Peer Popularity and Dependence on Adults in Preschool-Age Socialization

The present research was designed to investigate the interaction between popularity, dependency on adults, and sex in preschool-age children. Marshall and McCandless, studying 38 preschool children in two groups of the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station's Laboratory Preschools, found that on adults in the preschool situation accompanies relatively low social status and participation (2, p. 419). In that investigation dependency was defined as simply the total number of interactions with adults during a prescribed period of observation. In addition to this over-all negative relation between popularity and dependence, Marshall and McCandless found that sex differences significantly characterized the interaction between popularity and dependence; girls showed a median correlation between popularity and dependence of about --.70, while the median correlation for boys was about .40. The present study, then, began as an investigation of why (and if) dependency interferes more with popularity for girls than boys. The correlations reported by Marshall and McCandless imply that a relatively high percentage of adult contacts involve some sort of socially inap-