Theoretical Rationale for a Peer Rating Scale and Its Role in A Longitudinal Study

This paper focuses on the theory and rationale of assessing the social behavior of children. It is asserted that child social behavior must be assessed accurately in order to do research on socialization. Socialization is defined as the process by which an individual learns to interact with others. It is proposed that it is possible to design a peer rating approach to overcome weaknesses of the approaches most often used at present, the sociometric and the observation methods. It is noted that such a peer rating approach should employ several randomly assigned raters for each ratee in order to minimize error due to rater response tendencies and unique rater/ratee relationships. It should also employ an item sampling technique to examine as many social behaviors as possible. A review of the socialization literature and trial runs of measurement procedures led the authors to identify 12 constructs or variable