ROLE PLAYING SKILL AND SOCIOMETRIC PEER STATUS

Abstract

In this experiment the hypothesis tested is that children of high peer status differ from those of low peer status in role playing ability, with the former having greater skill than the latter in enacting assigned roles in standardized role playing situations. Although peer status often has been regarded as directly and positively associated with role taking ability, there has been little previous experimental work on this problem (5, 6, 8, 9, 10). Validation of the hypothesis under systematic conditions would demonstrate that one of the correlates of sociometric position is the ability to portray social roles effectively in "as if" situations.