Relación entre iguales, personalidad y problemas de ajustes en escolares de primaria de Huelva

Abstract

Childhood is the evolutionary period in which children develop widely the skills and attitudes necessary to allow them to adjust appropriately to their environment. At this stage, in addition to the family context, the school has a great importance since the children begin to develop in it their first interactions with their peers. These are fundamental to the learning of social skills, essential components of adequate social competence. But not all the relationships established between peers favor in the same way the psychosocial adjustment of the children, some of them being detrimental to their proper social and emotional development, The present Doctoral Thesis deepens in the understanding of the factors that influence in the positive adaptation of the children to their school contexts. Its general objective is to analyze the relations that are established between the following variables: the sociometric status of children, individual differences in personality and empathy, psychosocial adjustment of the children and the presence of behavior problems - especially in relation to aggression and the role that Is adopted in episodes of violence or bullying. It also wants to know how these relationships vary according to gender, age or type of school (public or private). The participants in the study are students of 4th grade in schools of Huelva (Spain). Several schools in the capital were contacted, explaining the purpose of the work and formally requesting the participation of the children through signed authorization by the parents/guardians. Finally, 247 students participated in the study, with 112 children and 135 girls with a mean age of nine years. For the data collection, some standardized instruments were used and others of own elaboration. The data collected were analyzed using the statistical package SPSS v.20.0. After analyzing the sociodemographic variables, we verified the internal consistency of the scores of the scales and subscales used by the Cronbach's alpha coefficient. For each of the variables we calculated the mean and standard deviation, and the possible relationships with the variables gender and type of (t-test of means comparison) and age (Pearson's correlation coefficient) were analyzed. In addition, after analyzing the correlation coefficients between the variables under study, we used four hierarchical linear regression models for the prediction of social preference, externalising problems, internalizing problems and total problems. Among the main conclusions of the investigation we can underline, in the first place, that the students more socially accepted show less externalizing and internalizing problems, they are not usually positioned as victims or aggressors and, moreover, they show more prosocial behaviors. Second, kindness and awareness are related to more prosocial behaviors and to less emotional and behavioral difficulties in general. Low openness and extraversión, and high emotional instability are also related to adjustment problems. On the other hand, the empathy does not seem to be a factor that influences the psychosocial adjustment of the children nor their sociometric position, although it does have a negative relation with the experience of aggressor in the episodes of violence or bullying. Likewise, greater prosociality is related to fewer externalizing and internalizing problems. The girls stand out for being more prosocial and the children for having more externalising problems. Finally, we want to highlight that our work has identified certain factors associated with children' psychosocial adjustment problems, which we understand can serve as a starting point for the design of plans for the prevention of behavior or emotional problems.