Boyce – assessing kindergarten hierarchy

So we assessed social position in the kindergarten study in two different ways. One was sending teams of two research assistants into a given kindergarten class. They sit down in a chair and they become like a potted plant. You know at first the kids are all wanting to know what are you doing and why are you here and so on, but if they just don’t answer and they just sit there and do their observations the kids pretty much begin to ignore them. What those research assistants did was to make systematic observations of interactions between two or three children that denote hierarchal relationships. So for example one child following another, or one child imitating another is an example of a kind of dominant subordination behaviour that we can record, and we recorded them on little hand help computers. No one of those little interactions meant anything by itself, but we eventually accrued something like 35 thousand observations of kids interactions over time and we were able to from that use a mathematical algorithm, a piece of software, to take those minute individual observations and put those into a pecking order that showed where each child was within the hierarchy. 

They would go in for oh probably three hours a day for three to five weeks until they had gathered enough data to feed into the software program that gave us the hierarchy.  

The other way that we assigned social position was with smaller groups of kids where we would bring them into a room with a big box and it had two peep holes and on the other side of the peep hole was the most enticing child’s video tape that was around at that point in time for five year olds and we would show them that this tape would play but you could only see it through the peep holes and it would only play if two buttons on the sides of the box were pressed and the two buttons were too far away for you to do it yourself. So you can see the situation we’re setting up. Where a quartet of boys would have to figure out who’s going to have the most viewing time, the least, and in between, and how are they going to kind of organize this thing so some kids get to see a few minutes, some kids get to see a lot of minutes and we would put in same sex quartets of boys and girls into this situation and then watch what happened.