[MUSIC] Okay, we just talked about some of the different ways that people have tried to understand how popular some kids are, and some of the limitations around those approaches. What we are going to talk about now is the way that's considered to be kind of the gold standard, the best way to understand how popular kids are. And it also suggests ways that you can think about popularity if you were interested in measuring that in other groups, like adults, for instance. And the way that that's done, is by asking peers to tell you how popular each person in that group is. And that certainly makes sense, right? If you want to know, how popular someone is among peers, ask the peers. Their opinions are the ones you're interested in learning about. That's been done in a couple different ways. One way is that that has been done by using play ratings. Play ratings are when you might give a small child a list of different kids in their class, Johnny, Susie, Keanu, and ask them for each one, so kind of indicate with these smiley faces, how much do you really like playing with this child? And what we find is that there's tremendous variability and there are very clear patterns that come up. Again, even at kids as young as three years old, we see patterns where some kids are very frequently not someone that kids like to play with. And others are very commonly, almost unanimously, chosen as someone that others do like to play with. And of course if kids are older, that same exact thing can be done but using a Likert scale rather than something that's developed for kids that can't read. There are a number of different ways that you can use photographs or different types of stimuli to get at that information among young kids, three years old. Then have them sort pictures into a box where they see a smiley face, and a neutral face, and a frowny face. And that really gives you a sense of how much someone is liked within the classroom. And sometimes you do a variety of training items to really help kids understand that, by showing them pictures of vegetables or birthday parties, and help them understand that. And results suggest that they can tell you a lot of information, very very reliably. By far the most common way to get at this information is to give kids a roster of all the peers in their class, or even in their entire grade. Or you could do it in a senior citizen home and do it with all the kids in that nursing home or in that planned development. Or all of the coworkers in an office. And you give them a roster of everyone, and you simply ask them to tell you, who do you like the most? Circle as many people on this roster as you would like. And then you give them a second roster and you ask them, who do you like the least? And again, they can circle as many people as they would like. And with that information, we can do a few different kinds of computations, and that gets us a sense of who's the most liked, who's popular, as well as a variety of other categories that really help us to understand popularity in a much more sophisticated way than we even had thought would be the case. A lot of people look at that and think, wait a minute, is it okay? Is it safe to give kids in elementary school a list and say circle all the kids you like the least? Isn't that mean? Isn't that going to make it hard for those kids? It turns out, not at all. There's research that's been done to see whether, after filling out something like this, where it says who do you like the least, whether it makes kids become more ostracized or teased, or whether in some way it makes kids feel bad. There's been a lot of careful research on this exact question, and it turns out it doesn't. And probably the reason why is because this is stuff that kids are talking about a lot already. And there's really nothing that really you're asking them to do that makes them now feel differently about kids or treat them differently than they did before you gave them that form. And for that reason, most all of the research that I'm going to talk about for the rest of this course, is going to be talking about findings that have used that exact procedure. We've asked kids to report who do you like the most, who do you like the least, and then divides up the responses to create a variety of different categories. And here's how that works. There's a way that this is done statistically, and I'm not going to get into too much of the details. But if you're interested, what happens is that for each kid, we take a tally, and we figure out, how many people nominated them as someone they like the most. And how many people nominated each child as someone they like the least? We get that total number of votes for each kid, for each of those categories, and then, for those of you who that might remember something about statistics, we standardize those. And we get a Z score or a way of controlling for the fact that different classrooms have different cultures. And there may be, the number of nominations you got might have a lot to do with the fact that there are different numbers of kids in each classroom. Once we get that information, we compute two scores. Now, one of those scores is called social preference, and what we do is we basically subtract the like least score from the standardized like most score. So in other words, a high score on this means that you are liked more than you are disliked, and you could get a negative score on this, which indicates that you are disliked more than you're liked. The second variable that we get from this is called social impact, and this is a measure that people frequently refer to as just visibility. So, where you nominated for anything at all? Or are you not really nominated? And for that, we add like most scores with like least scores, and there are some kids that really don't get picked for anything. And they, we'll talk about them in a moment. And there's some kids that get picked a lot, even though they're not necessarily liked. We refer to that as sociometric status, and that's what we're going to talk about next.
