Evaluating the Social Skills of Children from Multiple Evaluators: Comparison of Parents and Childcare Workers and Relationship between Behavioral Observation for 3-Year-Old Children

Abstract

In this study, we evaluated children's sociability from the multifaceted perspectives of children's parents, childcare workers, and authors, and conducted exploratory research on the characteristics and relationships of the evaluation results. There was a partial correlation between the results of childcare workers' evaluations based on questionnaires and the results analyzed by the authors based on behavioral observations of the children. (1) Extraversion who invites other children to play and plays while having conversations; (2) Internalizing problems with little interest in other children and a relatively long time spent playing alone. On the other hand, no relationship was found between the evaluation results of parents and childcare workers, or between parents and the authors. This study suggested that children express different behaviors at home and at nursery school, suggesting the significance of evaluation by multiple raters.