An Approach to the Study of Social Behavior in Children

In the present study of social development, the situation-response analysis has been used as the primary basis. On this basis the actual behavior of children in concretely described situations has constituted the primary data. Previous experiments have almost without exception used the technique of rating individual children on certain social traits. These ratings have usually been made on the basis of the observer\u27s general impression. When the original records are made in terms of such traits it becomes at once impossible to get beyond such ratings to the primary concrete events which presumably constituted the basis for the ratings. When the original records present sequences of actual happenings, however, it is entirely possible to analyze them both for trait categories and for rating values in terms of these categories