[MUSIC] Okay, so a really cool study that was done by John Coie and Janis Kupersmidt was really focused specifically on understanding what happens if you take kids who are really popular, really rejected, or neglected, controversial or average and you introduce them to brand new peers. This is the question that most parents ask me more than any other. What do I do if my kid is rejected or if they are somehow otherwise experiencing peer difficulties? What can we do to help and should we think about taking that kid and moving them to a new school? We're about to figure out what the answer is. The way that John Coie and Janis Kupersmidt did their study was very clever. They had access to kids from five different schools, actually many more but for this illustration I'll tell you about five different schools. And in each of these schools they did what we call a sociometric assessment. That's where they asked all the peers to say how much they like the most and like the least all of the kids in their class. And from that, every kid in each of those schools was categorized as being popular, rejected, neglected, controversial or average. What they did was, they formed new play groups that came to their lab at a university and played for awhile but they way that they form these play groups is very special. So from the first school, they pulled out a kid that was popular lets say. From the second school they pulled out a kid that was rejected. The third school neglected, the third school controversial and the fifth school average and they did this in all the permutations and combinations so basically, every playgroup they had had five kids from five different schools representing the five different sociometric status categories. This way they can ensure that these kids did not know each other and they span the full range of popularity. So once all these kids came to their lab and they met these new kids in their playgroup, they had them play with a bunch of toys, they had them play in some structured activities, some unstructured activities, and they didn't really interfere at all, very much. And they played. They played for an hour. And when they were done, a bunch of undergraduate research assistants took each kid home, drove them. And while they were driving, they talked to the kids, and they asked them about their hobbies and the things they were interested in but then, kind of sneaky, they said, hey, by the way, in the play group you were just in, with that playing we were just doing, who did you like the most? Who do you like the least? And they jotted that information down. And they all came back after they drove home all these kids, across all these different play groups they had formed and they tabulated the responses. And they wanted to see did any of these kids end up having the same level of popularity among these brand-new peers that they did in their schools where they were with peers they had known for years and years prior. So they did it for this first week. They got all the kids together. They played for an hour. And then they drove them home, got this information, came back, tabulated the results, what did they find? Nothing. There was no relationship between how well the kids were liked in this new play group, and how well liked they were in their previous schools. So they did it for a second week. Same thing, they played, one hour, drove them all home, got the information, came back, tabulated the results, nothing. Still, no relationship but after the third week, they found that after just three hours of these kids playing together, all the kids were starting to fall back into their old patterns. These were kids that never had met each other before and they only had played now for three hours, over one hour for each of three weeks. And by the end of week three the popular kid was now the popular kid in this play group. The rejected kid was now the rejected kid in this play group and so on. They continued doing the study for a few more weeks and what they found was that those relationships only got more and more potent and strong. So the popular kid became extremely popular by the end of the six week. And clearly was the most popular kid in this school, in the play group, excuse me. Same for the rejected, the neglected, the controversial and the average. There's something that's happening in just three hours of time that's making these kids recreate their whole peer world all over again. So, based on this, when parents ask me what do I do? Should I move my kid to a brand new school? The answer is probably no. Probably by the end of that very first day before lunch that child is probably going to have the same reputation among peers as they had in the first place all over again in a brand new place. Why? Why does that happen? Well that's what we're going to talk about in some of the future videos. We're going to really talk about what are some of the ways In which kids develop the level of popularity that they have but before we do, there's going to be one more video that's going to talk about a completely different type of popularity. And that's coming up next.
