Study On The Rural Middle School Students’ Peer Groups And Their Features

Peer groups play an important role in middle school students’ development. There havebeen lots of empirical studies in this area especially since1970. However, there are somelimitations in existing studies, which lie basically in their theoretical basis and researchmethodology. There are a lot of researches have focused on peer rejection and its relations tostudents’ school adjustment, and many of them used a cross-sectional research design.Nowadays, more and more studies concerning middle school students’ peer relationships wereconducted in western countries. In our country, there are fewer studies about peer groups.Concerning about the functions of peer groups on middle school students, the present researchhas been designed to clarify the stability, continuity and development of peer groups.Generally, students want to make friends with students who has the similarities as them,and then they will make peer groups. Actually, peer groups play an important role in middleschool students’ social development. The research wants to gain more information aboutmiddle school students’ peer groups. Information concerning about middle school students’social behavior and academic achievement. The results of this study show that middle schoolstudents’ peer groups have some features and considerable stability.The results are as fellows:(1) The First grade has the largest number of peer groups. The core group has the mostpeople of peer groups. The boys’ core groups have much more people than girls’ core groups.Many peer groups are formed by the same gender students.(2) There are twenty-three percent peer groups have aggressive behavior and fifty-twopercent peer groups have pro-social behavior in Grade One; fifty-six percent peer groups haveaggressive behavior and twelve percent peer groups have pro-social behavior in Grade Two;forty-four percent peer groups have aggressive behavior and twenty-four percent peer groupshave pro-social behavior in Grade Three; academic achievement plays an important role inpeer groups.(3) The middle school students’ peer groups have stability. The different classes havedifferent stability of peer groups.