PECEGUINA, Inês; SANTOS, António J.    DANIEL, João R.. A concordância entre medidas sociométricas e a estabilidade dos estatutos sociais em crianças de idade pré-escolar. []. , 26, 3, pp.479-490. ISSN 0870-8231.

Firstly introduced by Moreno (1934/1953), sociometry construct refers to a set of methodologies used to identify, simultaneously, the group social structure and the relative position each individual occupies in that structure. Despite being frequently applied, in a variety of psychology domains, only a small number of studies (e.g., Jiang & Cillessen, 2005; Wasik, 1987; Wu, Hart, Draper & Olsen, 2001) have posed the coherence question, among the assessments obtained via different measures, during the preschool period (i.e., children ages 3-to-5). Much more commonly, coherence questions tend to focus in the same measures examining, for instance, the evolution/change on sociometric status classifications. In the present study, eleven groups of children were interviewed (three groups of 3-yearolds; four groups of 4-year-old; and four groups of 5years-old children), using three different sociometric tasks/techniques: (1) nominations - 3 positive choices; 3 negative choices; (2) rating-scale - each child assessed each colleague individually and give him/her a rating ranging between 1 (like to play with a lot) and 3 (not at all); (3) paired comparison - each child was asked to choose one of the two children according to the stimulus which of these two children do you especially like?, for each possible pairs. The results obtained indicate that the three different sociometric tasks are statistically and significantly correlated, further suggesting that the coherence between these measures tend to increase, as children grow older. For the second question of this study - sociometric status stability, depicted from the nomination task, according to Coie, Dodge and Coppotteli’s procedures (1982), the results indicate a lack of stability, from one year to another, suggesting that the social status in the peer group tend to change, as assessed by the different evaluation moments.

: Sociometric measures; peer relations; sociometric status.

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