Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

A reliability and validity study of a measure of preschool competence

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https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/th83m1657

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  • Social competence has emerged in research on social development as a construct unifying behavioral and motivational dimensions of social development in the preschool child. It draws from theories of social learning, cognitive development, and competence motivation. The theoretical relevance and empirical utility of the construct indicate the need for further research on methods of measuring social competence. Recent investigators have noted the cultural relativity of social competence, as a construct which includes values about behavior. Although parents have been infrequently used as a population of experts for content validation, they could provide important information about the cultural values underlying a definition of competence. The present study investigates several methodological questions as they relate to Baumrind's Preschool Behavior Q Sort (PBQS), a measure of social competence. The questions include reliability and validity after modifications in administration; the construct validity of the PBQS factor Independence, when compared with an alternative measure of independence; and the content validity of the PBQS seven-cluster, two-factor model of preschool competence based on parental responses to PBQS items. Child data came from naturalistic observations of 36 preschool The sample was restricted to children between 48 and 60 months old, of normal and above verbal intelligence, and from middle class families. The PBQS was used to rate subjects after a 2.5 hour observation supplemented with anecdotal records collected by staff at the preschool. Parent subjects had children in the preschool which provided the child sample. The parent sample was homogeneous with respect to sociocultural background. Parents rated PBQS items presented as seven point Likert-type items. Questionnaires were completed by 97 parents. Interrater reliability was computed for each subject across 72 items and 7 clusters, for each cluster across all subjects, and for each item across all subjects. Reliability was high for most subjects. Reliability was significant for all clusters and 63 items. The matrix of interitem correlations for child data was analyzed on the basis of frequency of significant correlations and the mean correlation of each item with all others. Although some within-cluster correlations were in the expected pattern, between-cluster item correlations indicated a lack of independence between clusters. A stepwise discriminant analysis was used to test the relationship of the PBQS Independence factor to another measure of independence. In a model which discriminated between children having three levels of independence on Beller's Scale of Independence, less than one-half the items were PBQS Independence factor items. The matrix of interitem correlations for parent data was analyzed in the same way as the matrix for child data. The multi-cluster pattern of intercorrelations did not appear. Parents seemed to respond in terms of a univariate definition of social competence, with a strong consensus on items describing cooperation and compliance. There was a pronounced absence of consensus on most items describing independence. The modified administration procedure for the PBOS appeared to produce reliable ratings with questionable validity. Therefore, the results and conclusions of the study were applied to modify the cluster scoring procedure of the PBQS. The resulting three-cluster model appears to be more simplistic than Baumrind's seven clusters, but it is more valid in terms of the child ratings for the present study. The deviation of the three-cluster model from a parental definition of competence is easily delineated, since one of the three clusters strongly represents the parental definition for the sample of parents used in this study. In view of the empirical method by which clusters were derived, limited clinical or theoretical significance can be attached to the clusters. The clusters represent functionally related behavior indices, but their structural relationship has not been demonstrated.
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  • File scanned at 300 ppi (Monochrome) using Capture Perfect 3.0.82 on a Canon DR-9080C in PDF format. CVista PdfCompressor 4.0 was used for pdf compression and textual OCR.
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file details PettygroveWillaBowman1977.pdf 2017-08-07 Público Baixar