Elsevier

Journal of School Psychology

Volume 59, December 2016, Pages 1-11
Journal of School Psychology

The combined effects of teacher-child and peer relationships on children's social-emotional adjustment

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsp.2016.09.003Get rights and content

Abstract

Teachers and peers represent two important dimensions of the classroom social ecology that have important implications for children's social-emotional adjustment. This study examined the combined effects of teacher-child relationships (TCR) and peer relationships for 6–7 year-old children on their social-emotional adjustment at 8–9 years. The sample was comprised of children and their teachers participating in the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (n = 2857). Teachers reported on TCR, peer relationships, and children's emotional well-being, and children provided self-reported self-concept and school liking during a face-to-face interview. The analytic approach extends previous research by modeling TCR and peer relationships in combination, using cluster analysis to understand the nature of 6–7 year-old children's social relationships in the classroom. Five distinct profiles of children were identified: adaptive, teacher-oriented, teacher-child conflict prominent, non-adaptive, and invisible. The adaptive profile had the best outcomes on all three aspects of social-emotional adjustment at age 8–9; the non-adaptive profile had the poorest outcomes, and the invisible group was mid-range. The teacher-oriented and teacher-child conflict prominent groups had mixed outcomes for social-emotional adjustment. Implications for school psychologists and teachers are discussed.

Introduction

During the early years of school, the classroom is children's major social context outside of the home. Positive interactions with teachers and peers provide a sense of confidence and well-being and are at the core of children's adaptive social-emotional development (Hamre and Pianta, 2001, O'Connor et al., 2011, Pianta et al., 2012, Pianta and Walsh, 1996). The past decade has seen a growing awareness of the importance of not only seeking to improve children's academic skills but also enhancing social-emotional competence for better well-being and school engagement (Durlak et al., 2011, Jennings and Greenberg, 2009). As such, studies of children's relationships with teachers and peers during the early school years can contribute to the provision of effective strategies for classroom teaching and interactions that facilitate children's optimal development.

Ecological theory (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006) posits that children develop in a complex environment and are affected by multiple systems of relationships, including interactions with others in their immediate environments (i.e., Microsystems) and between microsystems (i.e., Mesosystems). As such, children's social-emotional development at school is affected not only by the relationships children have with their teachers and their peers, but also by the connections between these relationships. From a theoretical perspective, teacher-child relationships (TCR) and peer relationships can be seen as interrelated proximal processes that jointly contribute to children's dynamic classroom social experiences (Pianta, Hamre, & Stuhlman, 2003). Empirically, however, TCR and peer relationship effects have tended to be reported in separate bodies of research (exceptions are Leflot et al., 2011, Spilt et al., 2014, Verschueren et al., 2012).

In the current study, we focus on the effects of TCR and peer relationships on three aspects of children's social-emotional development: self-concept, emotional well-being and school liking. The early years of school are known to be a difficult stage of adjustment (Lynch & Cicchetti, 1997), requiring children to adapt to a new environment and negotiate the associated contextual changes, including a greater focus on interactions with teachers and peers, and increased expectations to follow classroom rules and directives (Harrison & Murray, 2015). The early school years are also a time when children expand their sense of self (Bong & Skaalvik, 2003), become more sensitive to social evaluations (Cole, 1991, Leflot et al., 2010) and develop feelings of liking or not liking school (Ladd, Buhs, & Seid, 2000). Research has shown that self-concept, emotional well-being and school liking have important implications for children's academic success, engagement, motivation, sense of school belonging and quality of life (Harrison et al., 2007, Ialongo et al., 2001, Marsh and Martin, 2011, Raufelder et al., 2013, Verkuyten and Thijs, 2002, Yeung, 2011, Zee et al., 2013).

Self-determination theory posits that each individual has three fundamental and interrelated psychological needs - relatedness, autonomy, and competence, and that these need to be met in order to achieve optimal motivation, social development and personal well-being (Deci and Ryan, 1985, Urdan and Schoenfelder, 2006). Children who feel connected to, and loved and cared for by their teachers and peers (i.e., meeting the need for relatedness) are more likely to internalize what their environment deems as important, such as following classroom rules and valuing and liking school. In such a context, children are also more likely to be motivated to autonomously explore the learning and social environment, and to build competence and a sense of self-worth. Research has shown that children's development of emotional problems (such as loneliness, sadness, depression, and anxiety), lower general self-concept and global self-esteem, negative social and academic self-concept, lower school liking and higher levels of school avoidance and antisocial behaviors are associated with negative experiences with peers, such as peer victimization, rejection, and neglect, as well as poor peer acceptance and lack of friends during the elementary school years (Buhs, 2005, Ladd et al., 1997, Ladd and Troop-Gordon, 2003, Mercer and DeRoiser, 2008, Mesman et al., 2001, Rudolph et al., 2011, Snyder et al., 2003, Thijs and Verkuyten, 2008, Troop-Gordon and Ladd, 2005, Vandell and Hambree, 1994, Verkuyten and Thijs, 2002).

In comparison, there is limited research on links between children's social-emotional adjustment and their relationships with teachers. Positive TCR (indicated by high closeness and low conflict) has been found to protect children with early emotional symptoms from developing long-term emotional problems (O'Connor et al., 2011). Positive TCR has also been linked to higher school liking and more positive perceptions of school (Birch and Ladd, 1997, Murray and Greenberg, 2000), and more conflicted TCR has been associated with higher levels of child stress, as measured by salivary cortisol (Ahnert, Harwardt-Heinecke, Kappler, Eckstein-Madry, & Milatz, 2012). Less consistent results have been reported for TCR and children's self-concept. Positive TCR predicted higher social self-concept (Leflot et al., 2010, Spilt et al., 2014), but not general self-concept during early elementary years (Leflot et al., 2010), and academic self-concept but not general or social self-concept among first grade students (Verschueren et al., 2012).

In addition, a small number of studies have investigated the combined effects of TCR and peer relationships on classroom adjustment. Spilt et al. (2014) found that higher teacher support weakened the negative effect of peer rejection on children's social self-concept. In a similar vein, Verschueren et al. (2012) reported that the negative effects of peer problems on first graders' social self-concept decreased as TCR quality increased. Whilst these studies indicate that positive teacher relations can compensate for negative peer relations, the variable-centered approach (i.e., regression) assumed that different combinations of TCR and peer relationships are equally likely, which is not necessarily true.

The present study extends previous regression analytical technique by modeling TCR and peer relationships using a person-centered approach (cluster analysis) to describe the nature of classroom relationships. Cluster analysis generates profiles of children based on their actual response patterns to a combination of variables; thus, it is less artificial compared to regression approach and provides a picture of the functioning of individual children (Magnusson & Bergman, 1988). In much the same way that different dimensions of TCR have been found to generate meaningful TCR profiles (Ahnert et al., 2012, Murray and Greenberg, 2000, Pianta, 1994), we expected that the combined dimensions of TCR and peer relationships would generate profiles that describe different patterns of child-teacher-peer relationships in the classroom.

The present study aimed to investigate two research questions:

1) What social relationship profiles exist in the classroom?

2) How do different social relationship profiles function in relation to children's social-emotional adjustment?

Due to the exploratory nature of cluster analysis and the lack of prior research integrating both TCR and peer relationships, we made tentative hypotheses, drawing on previous literature of different profiles based on TCR only (Ahnert et al., 2012, Murray and Greenberg, 2000, Pianta, 1994). We expected that there would be an adaptive cluster (i.e., positive relationships with both teachers and peers), a non-adaptive cluster (i.e., negative relationships with both teachers and peers), and an uninvolved cluster (i.e., neither positive nor negative relationships with teachers and peers). In addition, based on studies that found interactive effects between TCR and peer relationships (Spilt et al., 2014, Verschueren et al., 2012), we hypothesized that there might be a cluster with positive relationships with teachers but not peers, and another cluster with positive relationships with peers but not teachers. In terms of predictive effects on children's social-emotional development, we expected that clusters with close and trusting relationships with teachers and peers are likely to provide children with the emotional security and support for healthy social behaviors, positive self-worth, emotional well-being, and commitment to school (Bretherton and Munholland, 1999, Deci and Ryan, 1985). Therefore, we hypothesized the adaptive cluster to fare the best in children's social-emotional outcomes whereas the maladaptive cluster would perform the worst. We hypothesized the other clusters to function in-between in children's social-emotional outcomes.

This study contributes to the literature in four important ways. First, we focused on children's self-concept, emotional well-being and school liking to enrich the literature linking TCR and children's social-emotional adjustment. Second, we integrated TCR and peer relationships to provide a holistic understanding of classroom social relationship patterns. Third, we tested predictive associations between differential relationship patterns and social-emotional adjustment two years later. Such an understanding is important to help identify profiles of students who need support in classroom interpersonal relationships and to better understand how classroom relationships affect children's social-emotional well-being. In turn, this can enable the design of targeted interventions for children who are experiencing social relationship difficulties.

Finally, we followed the recommendations of using multiple informants (Sabol & Pianta, 2012), with teachers reporting on classroom relationships and both teachers and children reporting on social-emotional outcomes. Using multiple informants can add more confidence to the robustness of the findings. In addition, it helps reduce the potential inflated relations among variables, in other words, shared method variance, that are typically associated with a single informant.

Section snippets

Participants and procedure

We used data from the Kindergarten cohort of Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC). LSAC is a nationally representative longitudinal study of child development funded by the Australian Government Department of Social Services (formerly the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs). The sampling frame for LSAC was the Medicare Australia enrolments database (public health insurance), the most comprehensive database of the

Results

Means, standardized deviations, correlations among variables and Cronbach's αs are presented in Table 2. The majority of correlations ranged from small to moderate size. TCR closeness was negatively related to TCR conflict, peer problems, and emotional symptoms but positively related to self-concept and school liking. On the other hand, TCR conflict and peer problems were positively related to emotional symptoms but negatively related to self-concept and school liking.

An examination of the

Discussion

Relationships with teachers and peers represent two important dimensions of the social ecology of the classroom (Spilt et al., 2014). The current study was the first to investigate the classroom social relationship patterns using dimensions of TCR (closeness and conflict) and peer relationships (peer problems). Our analyses identified five distinct classroom relationship profiles at 6–7 years of age and these profiles had differential relationships with children's social-emotional adjustment at

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    Acknowledgement: The preparation of this paper was supported by the Excellence in Research in Early Years Education Collaborative Research Network (CRN2011:01), an initiative funded through the Australian Government's Collaborative Research Networks (CRN) programs

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