Examination of the contribution of clique characteristics to children's adjustment: Clique type and perceived cohesion

Abstract

In a sample of 473 4th- and 5th-grade students, we examined the interaction between the type of clique to which a child belongs and the clique's level of perceived cohesion on a clique member's social and emotional adjustment. Perceived cohesion of a clique was operationalized as the degree to which the clique was perceived as an entity and was measured by submitting peers' similarity judgments of same-gender peers to a multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis. Clique types were determined based on clique members' average scores on a wide range of social behaviors. Correlation analyses indicated that the degree to which children were perceived to be similar to each other was highly related to the strength of their affiliative ties, providing support for a similarity-based assessment of the perceived cohesion of a clique. It was also found that perceived cohesion moderates the link between the type of clique to which a child belongs and self-reported social and emotional adjustment outcomes.Whether it is beneficial or not to belong to a highly cohesive clique appears to depend on the type of clique to which a child belongs.