Potential Shift Patterns In Children's Peer Relationships And Reactive And Proactive Aggression

Peer relationship and aggressive behavior play an important role in children’s mental health development.According to previous studies,children’s peer relationship and aggressive behavior are closely related,and there is a certain degree of stability in the vertical development,but how the unstable part changes development is still unknown.This study explored the development and transformation patterns of peer relationship and potential categories of reactive and proactive aggression by using the human centered method and latent transition analysis.With the method of cluster sampling,a primary school in Nankai District of Tianjin in one to three grade 758 children as the research object for five times tracking between April 2017 and October 2019,report by teachers and children report to fill in "reactive-active aggression questionnaire" measurement of children’s aggression,adopt the method of peer nomination,let the children in the class to nominate at least three favorite and as least favorite students,to measure children’s peer relations.The results showed that:(1)According to the classification standard of Coie,children’s peer relations can be divided into average,popular,rejected,neglected and contradiction between five types.The transition analysis of peer relation types of children was carried out on five follow-up measures,the results showed that: on average,popular and rejected children are more stable,ignore and contradiction between children’s stability is low,will transit to the other three groups;(2)According to the classification criteria of Dodge et al.,children with different levels of aggression were divided into normal children,reactive aggression,the proactive aggression,mixed aggressive children and aggression tendency children.The transition analysis of aggression type of children was carried out on 5 follow-up measures,the results showed that: in the aggression type,normal children and aggression tendency child is relatively stable,and reactivity,proactive and aggressive children transition probability;(3)Taking social preference,reactive and active aggression as indicators,to latent profile analysis of five tracking data.The results show that there are four heterogeneous combination patterns of social preference and reactive active aggression: low social preference-high aggression group,medium social preference-medium high aggression group,medium social preference-medium low aggression group and high social preference-low aggression group.(4)Among the four developmental transitions,the high social preference-low aggression group had the highest stability,and the low social preference-high aggression group had the most instability.In the transition part,most of the children switched to the high social preference-low aggression group and the medium social preference & medium low aggression group,while only a small proportion of the children switched to the low social preference-high aggression group.This study goes beyond the variable centered method of previous studies,and uses the human-centered research path to regard children’s peer relationship and reactive and active aggression as an interdependent whole.It focuses on the development mode of individual peer relationship and reactive and active aggression over time,which provides reference for the training of positive peer relationship and the intervention of aggressive behavior provides an important empirical basis.