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Article Excerpt
This study examined the effects of gender and context on relations between children's friendship features (intimacy, exclusivity, and aggression) and socially exclusive gestures and remarks. One hundred forty dyads of mutually nominated close friends (N = 280, ages 10, 12, and 14) participated in a laboratory study of social exclusion toward a newcomer and then rated features of their friendship. As compared to boys, in the presence of the provoking peer, girls' aggressive friendship features were less strongly related to exclusive verbalizations but more strongly related to observed exclusive gestures, in the absence of the provocateur, girls' aggressive friendship features were more strongly related to exclusive remarks than were boys' friendship features. These findings suggest that the relation between friendship features and social exclusion may be influenced more by context for girls and that girl friends may dissemble more when excluding a newcomer, perhaps in keeping with their interpersonal needs for communion and harmony.
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When children are annoyed or angry, they sometimes exclude the targets of their irritation from social interaction by sneering or turning away or refusing to interact, by leaving them out of conversations or groups or social plans, or even by baldly stating, "You can't sit here" or "You are not invited." Children often engage in social exclusion in the company of their friends, fueled by an "us against them" quality where they feel secure in shutting someone else out because they are in the presence of an ally. Social exclusion is a component of the broader construct of social aggression, behaviors deployed to harm peers by disrupting their friendships or damaging their social status in the peer group (Underwood, 2003). Almost by definition, socially aggressive behaviors, including social exclusion, require the involvement of the larger peer group (Xie, Swift, Cairns, & Cairns, 2002) and may occur in the context of interactions involving friends.
The primary goal of this research was to understand how specific features of children's friendships relate to socially exclusive behaviors with unfamiliar peers. The specific friendship features examined were those that have been conceptually and empirically linked to social exclusion: intimacy, exclusiveness, and aggression (both physical and relational, within the friendship and toward others) (Grotpeter & Crick, 1996; Sebanc, 2003). Because these previous studies suggest that particular features of children's friendships, some positive and some negative, may be related to social aggression, we follow Berndt (1996) in using the term "features" to describe specific attributes (whereas the term "quality" refers to overall positivity or negativity). This study examines how friendship features of girls' and boys' dyads relate to socially exclusive gestures and verbalizations as observed both in the presence and the absence of a provoking newcomer (Underwood, Scott, Galperin, Bjornstad, & Sexton, 2004). Gender and developmental differences in social exclusion in this study were previously reported; this study focuses on how specific features of girls' and boys' friendships are related to responses to a provoking newcomer and examines gender differences in these relations.
Friendship features are measured here at the level of the dyad for two reasons. First, these research questions focused on the quality of the relationship between the two mutually nominated close friends rather than characteristics of each individual (for a discussion of this distinction, see Hartup & Stevens, 1997). Second, because close friends interacted together with the provoking newcomer, the observational data were dyadic.
Are friendship features of intimacy, exclusivity, and aggressiveness related to social exclusion toward a newcomer, and does this relation differ for girls and boys depending on whether the provocateur is present or absent? Several bodies of previous literature bear on these questions, research on social exclusion as a form of social aggression, friendship features and social exclusion, friendships and gender, and gender and context.
Social Exclusion As a Form of Social Aggression
Social exclusion is an important social process to understand for several reasons. Social exclusion is a key component of social aggression. Social aggression is closely related to the constructs of indirect aggression (Feshbach, 1969; Lagerspetz, Bjorkqvist, & Peltonen, 1988) and relational aggression (Crick & Grotpeter, 1995) but is distinct in that the conceptualization of social aggression acknowledges that relationship harm can take both direct and indirect forms (Archer & Coyne, 2005) and can include nonverbal forms of social exclusion (Galen & Underwood, 1997; Underwood, 2003). Because there is large overlap among the constructs, previous work on relational and indirect aggression informs this research.
Social aggression is related to peer rejection and psychological distress for both perpetrators (Crick & Grotpeter, 1995; Crick, 1997) and victims (Crick & Grotpeter, 1996; Paquette & Underwood, 1999). Children in the United States and Indonesia frequently cited social ostracism as a reason for not liking peers (French, Jansen, & Pidada, 2002). In another study, when asked what children do when they are angry or want to be mean to someone else, girls and less frequently boys reported behaviors such as keeping the person out of a group, not being friends with the person, and telling lies about the person (Crick, Bigbee, & Howes, 1996).
Although the primary goal of this work was to examine how gender and social context may influence the relation between friendship features and social exclusion, results of this study might bear on the ongoing debate as to whether girls are more socially or relationally aggressive than boys are (for reviews, see Archer & Coyne, 2005; Underwood, 2003). However, gender differences in the frequency of social aggression may not be as important as differences in the social processes involved and the meaning of these behaviors for each gender group (Underwood, 2003). Compelling evidence suggests that regardless of who engages in social aggression more, girls may be more distressed by social aggression than boys are (Paquette & Underwood, 1999), and girls' experiences of relational aggression may be more strongly related to their psychosocial adjustment than boys' relational aggression (Crick & Zahn-Waxler, 2003). Differences in the impact of social aggression on girls and boys may be due in part to subtle differences in how the behaviors unfold (Maccoby, 2004; Underwood, 2003). As important as it is to test gender differences in social exclusion, it is also important to understand individual differences in these behaviors: why some children are highly exclusive and others are not. This study examines a possible source of individual differences in social aggression, features of children's friendships, and how these interact with gender and context.
Friendship Features and Social Exclusion
Friendships exert important influences on children's interactions with other peers, for better or for worse (Hartup & Abecassis, 2002; Berndt, 1996, 2004). Antisocial boys have friendships that are conflictual and negative (Dishion, Andrews, & Crosby, 1995); if a boy has friends who are antisocial, that boy is likely to be come more antisocial over time (Dishion, 1990). The impact on the target child's own aggression of having an aggressive close friend may differ for girls and boys. For girls only in a sample of children with reciprocated friends in grades 2-4 who were followed over one year's time, having a friend who was high on relational aggression predicted increases in the target girls' relational aggression over one school year (Werner & Crick, 2004). Girls may be especially likely to model and reinforce relational aggression with their friends. "When two friends collaborate in the use of relational aggression against another person ... this aversive behavior might actually promote cohesiveness, or otherwise strengthen the ties between the two friends" (Werner & Crick, 2004, p. 499).
Only a few previous studies have examined whether friendship features relate to how friends might engage in social exclusion with other peers. One investigation with preschoolers found that teacher reports of the exclusivity of particular friendship pairs were positively related to the extent to which children engaged in relational aggression toward other peers (Sebanc, 2003). In another study with 9- to 11-year-olds, children rated as highly relationally aggressive by peers had friendships characterized by more intimacy, exclusivity, and relational aggression within the friendship than other dyads did (Grotpeter & Crick, 1996). Neither of these studies found gender differences in the relationships between friendship features and relational aggression. However, gender differences may have been masked because neither teacher ratings nor peer nominations of a child's general propensity for relational aggression may reflect specific social processes, such as social exclusion, or the possible effects of social context.
Together, these studies suggest that specific features of friendships may be correlated with social exclusion. Friends who are highly exclusive, who jealously guard the relationship from intruders, seem highly likely to be unwelcoming of a newcomer. Highly intimate friends who disclose a great deal of personal information to one another may not only be well armed with ammunition to spread malicious rumors about others but may also be anxious to protect the friendship from the intrusion of a newcomer because they both run the risk of disclosure of a vast store of highly personal information. Children who engage in relational and physical aggression within the friendship seem likely to be unwelcoming of a newcomer; if they are mean to their friends, it seems likely that they would be unkind to an unfamiliar provocateur. Considering whether these relations between friendship features and social exclusion might differ by gender requires consideration of research on gender and...
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