The Development Of Junior High School Peers And Their Impact On Cooperation Trends, Expectations And Behaviors

The influence of peers on adolescents is most prominent.In peer interaction,peer group not only affect the scope and quality of children's social interaction,but also plays a key and unique role in social development.Cooperation is an important social intercourse activity.Good cooperative ability is a necessary skill for students in the 21 st century.Cooperation not only can help the students accomplish task better,but also facilitates people to integrate more quickly into peer groups and adapt to a complex environments.In order to explore the structure characteristics and development of peer groups and the influence of different types of peer groups on cooperation,this paper studies from the following two aspects.Study 1 selected two batches of students from a middle school in Suzhou,the characteristics,trends and causes of junior high school students' peer groups were discussed.In the first batch,we tracked 768 students in the first grade and asked them to accomplish the Social Cognitive Map.In the second batch,104 students were selected to finish a self-made questionnaire to investigate the changes and reasons of peer groups.Among them,we interviewed 14 students for future reasons.The result shows:(1)On group size,girl groups are significantly smaller than mixed groups in different gender combinations.Urban and rural groups are significantly smaller than cross-background groups in different background combinations.Non-local groups are significantly smaller than the cross-region groups in different geographical combinations.Only-child and non-only child groups are significantly smaller than mixed groups.(2)On group numbers,there are more girl groups than boy groups,the mixed gender groups are the least.Urban groups are more than the rural ones and the cross-background groups are the most.Local groups are more than non-local groups,the cross-region groups are the most.Not-only child groups are more than only-child groups and the mixed groups are the most.(3)In the second year,the size of peer groups grew larger,however,total group numbers almost does not change.(4)In different gender combinations,the average stability of peer groups is high,girl groups' is the most stable and the mixed gender groups' is the most unstable ones.(5)The mutual understanding among members of peer groups is the main reason of the changes in peer groups.Study 2 selected the cooperative tendency rating scale and the public goods dilemma experiment to do research on 750 students who are in peer groups.We investigated differences in cooperative tendency,cooperative expectation and cooperative behavior of different types of peer groups.And than discussed how peer groups' cooperation in the first year affect individual's in the second year with the Hierarchical Linear Modeling(HLM).The result shows:(1)In the cooperative tendency,the main effect of background group is significant.The cooperative tendency of cross-background groups is significantly higher than that of rural groups.The interaction of gender group,geographical group and whether the only birth group is significant.In the cooperative expectation,the interaction of gender group,geographical group and single birth group is significant.In the cooperative behavior,the main effect and the interaction are not significant.(1)On cooperative behavior,the main effect of different gender combination groups is significant,so as the groups whether its members are only-child.Between the two variables,the interaction is significant.(2)In the first year,junior high school students' cooperative expectation will predict their cooperative expectation in the second year,so does the cooperative behavior.Peer groups' cooperative tendency in the first year will predict negative development of individual's cooperative behavior in the second year.