The purposes of this study were (a) to determine the percentages of the aggressive and the withdrawn children in the sociometrically determined rejected group, and (b) to compare these rejected aggressives or withdrawns with the nonrejected counterparts in terms of view of their social skills and social acceptance. 152 sixth-grade elementary school children were given two diffrent sociometric measures and a peer nomination scale as follows : (1) a positive and negative nomination measure in which they were asked to write the names of each three children they "most liked to play with" and "least liked to play with" in their classroom; (2)a rating-scale measure on which the children rated each classmate on a five-point scale according to how much they liked to play with that person at school; (3)peer nomination scale on which the children were asked to nominate, for each 19 items, the names of two same-sex classmates whom they felt best fit that discription (included aggression, withdrawal, and likeability). Based on the positive and the negative sociometoric nominations (Cole et al., 1982), six socimetric status (rejected, neglected, average, controvertial, popular, and other) were identified. Futher, highly aggressive and highly withdrawn children were selected on the basis of scores of the peer monination scale. The main results were as follows: (1) 54% of the rejected children were nominated by peers as highly aggressive and/or highly withdrawn. (2) 58% of the aggressives and 43% of the withdrawns fell into the rejected group. (3) The rejected children obtained lower score of likeability and sociometric rating than children of the other sociometric status. (4) The withdrawns, as compared with the aggresives, were low on the likeability and the sociometric rating scores. The two findings obtained in this study that the rejected group was consisted of the aggressives and the withdrawn children and that a considerable number of the withdrawn children were involved in the rejected group were inconsistent with the previous observational studies on the children of the different sociometric status. This was discussed from the viewpoint that there was a developmental shift of the norm by which the children deside what is the appropriate way of peer interaction through elementary school years. Futher results in the present study suggested that the withrawn and the rejected children had a problem of social acceptance because of the lack of social skills nessesary to interact positively with peers.
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