About this srcd poster session

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Panel information
Panel 22. Social Relationships

Abstract

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Social support has been shown to positively correlate with prosocial behavior. Indeed, prior research has found relationships and personal support as major factors promoting altruism among urban adults (Mattis et al., 2011). Yet, most research on the association between peer support and prosociality in children has been done in high-stress laboratory situations, but these studies have shown that social support is correlated with prosocial behavior in low-stress control scenarios (Alen, 2021). Thus, there is a gap in the literature regarding the benefits of peer social support for children’s prosocial behaviors in daily circumstances. Children undergo significant cognitive and social development in the transition from early to middle childhood making this a developmental period worth examining for this association (Mah, 2012).

Social support differs by geographic regions throughout the United States. Rural communities report high levels of child social support in terms of trusted adults (Hardy et al., 2024), yet less is known about peers. Further, research on prosocial tendencies by geography remains unclear; while some studies show urbanicity is negatively correlated with prosocial behavior, other studies conclude this relationship is confounded by neighborhood wealth and socioeconomic factors.

This study used two timepoints from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Studies Kindergarten 2011 (ECLS-K:2011) program to investigate, first, how children’s perception of their own social support from peers at third grade relates to teacher-reported prosocial behaviors at fourth grade, controlling for third grade self-rated and teacher-rated prosocial behaviors. Second, we explore the impact of rurality on each of these relationships.

Preliminary results demonstrated higher levels of peer support at grade 3 were associated with higher levels of teacher-rated prosocial skills at grade 4, even after controlling for child- and teacher-reported prosocial skills at grade 3 (see Table 2). Results also suggest that higher socioeconomic status, female sex, child disability status, and having married parents were all related to higher teacher-reported grade 4 prosocial skills. Additionally, the association between peer support and prosocial skills did not vary across rurality. Future analyses will investigate additional covariates. Based on our findings, it appears that peer support can enable prosocial skills longitudinally and these benefits do not vary based on rurality.

Our results suggest that social support and prosocial behaviors are very related to each other. Further, children’s perceptions of their own prosocial inclinations align with the frequency with which they are observed by adults other than their parents. Future interventions may capitalize on this relationship in strengthening children’s socioemotional and prosocial competencies through fostering robust social support in the classroom and community. As there was no significant variation by rurality, potential interventions may be more generalizable than originally hypothesized, though we will continue to probe other covariates of interest to determine other points of variability across middle childhood in the United States.

Author information

Author	Role
Morgan Alayna Gilmer, UNC Greensboro	Presenting author
Kierra M.P. Sattler, UNC Greensboro	Non-presenting author

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