Sociometric Methods

Sociometric Questions

In its original form, the sociometric test, or nominations technique, was too simplistic. An individual should nominate a number of partners to carry out some activities such as study, work, etc. Sometimes the social status is defined simply by social acceptance or the number of peer nominations to the question Who do you like the most to … (LM)? and sometimes is combined with a measure of social rejection, defined by the number of nominations to the question Whom do you like the least to … (LL)? Northway (1967) suggests that in any test, three or four criteria should be used as the bases for the choices, limited in number, and the questions should be formulated in the conditional mood. Terry (2000) emphasizes that an unspecified number of choices are necessary to locate the full range of choice patterns.

There have been many variations on the sociometric questions. One of them has been the self-rating method whereby the subject predicts who s/he will be chosen by. Another method is the rating-scale (Maassen et al., 2000) that consists of a 5-point scale next to the name of each group partner. More complex approaches have combined choices data with behavioural descriptions or psychosocial attributes (Coie et al., 1982). In the latter, the individual should nominate the partners who exhibit the target behaviour or attribute (e.g. Who is the most aggressive one in the group?).

Measures Derived from Sociometric Methods

The earliest approach to the quantification of sociometric data was the socio-matrix whereby all the choices are recorded and then added. The number of choices given to the whole criteria provides an indication of the sociometric status. Other indices frequently used to characterize an individual were: rejection, positive expansion, negative expansion, affective connection, perceptive attention, and perceptive realism. Probabilistic models have been also considered to identify individuals who receive greater or fewer choices than they would receive by chance.

The social status definitions vary depending on whether acceptance or rejection scores are combined or whether acceptance alone is used. Peery (1979) emphasizes that the positive and negative nominations should be combined into two new dimensions of sociometric status: Social Impact (SI) and Social Preference (SP). The SI score, which is a measure of social salience, is obtained by adding up the LM and LL nominations (SI = LM + LL). An individuaL's liking score minus his/her disliking score yields a score called Social Preference (SP = LM − LL). Coie et al. (1982) and Newcomb and Bukowski (1983) refined Peery's system. Coie et al. proposed the standardized approach that consists of standardizing the scores within each group. Newcomb and Bukowski (1983) offered an alternative procedure based on binomial probability.

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