Stability of continuous measures of sociometric status: a meta-analysis

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Abstract

A meta-analytic review was conducted of 77 studies including 93 samples and 18,339 participants that examine both the short-term and long-term stability of four continuous dimensions of sociometric status: acceptance, rejection, social preference, and peer ratings. A large mean short-term stability was found for each dimension, indicating good test–retest reliability of sociometric measurements. Weighted least square regression analysis revealed that long-term stability was influenced by four factors: children’s age, gender, the length of the time interval across which stability was examined, and the year the study was published. The current study provides evidence for good reliability and high stability of continuous dimensions of peer status in childhood and adolescence.

Section snippets

Literature search

The literature search for this study consisted of three steps. The process started with a broad search of the literature and then became more focused in each subsequent step.

Step 1. In this step, relevant articles were collected using three sources of information. First, a computerized literature search of PsyINFO from 1967 to 2002, the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) from 1973 to 2002, the Educational Resource Information Center (ERIC) from 1966 to 2002, and PsycArticles from 1988 to 2002

Reliability and stability

The four reliability data sets included 30 samples for acceptance, 12 for rejection, 10 for social preference, and 11 for liking ratings. The average effect size for each data set was computed by weighting each effect size (test–retest correlation coefficient) by the inverse of its variance using SPSS MEANES (Wilson, 2001). As shown in Table 1, the average reliability coefficients for acceptance, rejection, social preference, and liking ratings were .72, .70, .82, and .78, respectively,

Discussion

The current meta-analysis showed that all four continuous sociometric measurements (acceptance, rejection, social preference, and liking ratings) have good test–retest reliability. Among the four, social preference and liking rating (.82 and .78) appeared to have relatively higher reliabilities than acceptance and rejection (.72 and .70). This finding has some important implications. Traditionally, researchers have argued that peer ratings are more reliable than peer nominations (Asher and

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  • Cited by (0)

    This research was supported by a grant from the University of Connecticut Research Foundation to the second author. The authors are grateful to Blair T. Johnson for his assistance with this study. Parts of this research were presented at the annual meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Baltimore, MD, March, 2003.

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