European Journal of Special Needs Education Vol. 22, No. 1, February 2007, pp. 15–30
Does being friendly help in making friends? The relation between the social position and social skills of pupils with special needs in mainstream education Per Frostada and Sip Jan Pijlb* aUniversity
of Trondheim, Norway;
bUniversity
of Groningen, The Netherlands
European 10.1080/08856250601082224 REJS_A_208161.sgm 0885-6257 Original Taylor 102007 22
[email protected]; SipPijl 00000February and & Article Francis Journal (print)/1469-591X Francis 2007 ofLtd Special
[email protected] Needs (online) Education
Pupils with special needs can have difficulties in building relationships with peers in inclusive education. An important condition for developing positive relationships with peers is having the age-group appropriate social skills. It seems likely that pupils with an insufficient set of social skills face a larger risk of being excluded. This study describes the social skills of pupils with special needs and relates these to their social position in inclusive classrooms. In total 989 pupils from the 4th and 7th grades participated in the data collection. The analyses are based on three different indexes for social inclusion: peer acceptance, friendships and membership of a cohesive subgroup. The results show that 20% to 25% of the pupils with special needs are not socially included in their peer group. In general social position and social skills show low correlations, but that does not hold for pupils with behaviour problems. Their social position strongly relates to their social skills. For this particular group, social skills training can support them in maintaining contacts, relationships and friendships with their peers.
Keywords: Special needs education; Social position; Social skills Introduction Most children have no problem in making contacts and building relationships with peers and other people (Powless & Elliott, 1993). Hartup (1989) distinguishes horizontal and vertical relationships. Vertical relationships are those formed with individuals with more (or less) knowledge and power. Children have these relationships with, for instance, parents or teachers. Horizontal relationships are formed with *Corresponding author. Department of Special Education, University of Groningen, Grote Rozenstraat 38, 9712 TJ Groningen, The Netherlands. Email:
[email protected] ISSN 0885–6257 (print)/ISSN 1469–591X (online)/07/010015–16 © 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/08856250601082224
16 P. Frostad and S. J. Pijl partners with more equal status, generally peers. These relationships with peers of equal status are of great value in the development of children (Schaffer, 1996). An important condition for developing positive relationships with peers is having the age-group appropriate social skills. These can be defined as socially acceptable learned behaviours that enable a person to interact effectively with others and to avoid socially unacceptable responses (Gresham & Elliot, 1990). Examples of this are helping, initiating relationships, requesting help, giving compliments and saying ‘please’ or ‘thank you’. Children learn these skills by copying others, via trial and error and by using instructions from more experienced people. Learning social skills is not a once-only activity. The skills to communicate and relate to young children differ from those needed in school, in secondary education or in early adolescence. Research has made clear that children who master these skills insufficiently do indeed have difficulty in communicating and relating to others. They experience problems in playing, working and learning with other children, which may well result in a certain degree of isolation. In school settings they typically run the risk of being ignored or rejected, of not acquiring membership of a group and of having no friends. The effects of such an isolated position have been described extensively. Rejection by peers takes away a sense of belonging at school, it hinders access to social experiences and is devastating in terms of self-image, self-confidence, motivation and school performance (Asher & Coie, 1990). It is far from easy to change such an isolated position. The lack of contacts with other peers results in limited practice with social skills and the required new skills for subsequent age groups are therefore not learned. This results obviously in an even less appropriate set of social skills (Schaffer, 1996). Training the required skills with pupils with limited social skills is generally effective in pre-/post-test designs, but the long-term effects are disappointing (Pfiffner & McBurnett, 1997; Grizenko et al., 2000; Soresi & Nota, 2000). Already, after four to five months, the newly learned skills have faded. One explanation for the failing long-term effect is that, despite the newly acquired skills, the trained pupils do not succeed in communicating and relating to peers. This is not because they do not master the skills, but because the peer group does not change its attitude and behaviour. Their image of the trained pupils does not change (Bierman et al., 1987; Mize & Ladd, 1990; Grizenko et al., 2000). The trained pupils do not have many possibilities to practise their new skills, the training does not pay off for them and after some time the new skills seem of little use and are dropped. The social skills of pupils with special needs Pupils with special needs can have difficulties in building relations with normally developing peers. They have been described as pupils particularly at risk in acquiring insufficient sets of social skills (Greenspan & Granfield, 1992; Garrison-Harrell & Kamps, 1997; Pfiffner & McBurnett; 1997; Scheepstra et al., 1999; Soresi & Nota,
Social skills of SEN pupils 17 2000; Monchy et al., 2004). Some of them do not have the physical, sensorial or intellectual capacities to learn the social skills needed (King et al., 1997). Others show forms of deviant behaviour that prevents peers from interacting and relating. It has been pointed out that it is difficult to separate cause from effect (Spence et al., 1999). Lacking the appropriate skills will cause difficulty in establishing social relations, but students experiencing a decreasing number and quality of social experiences will end finally with an underdeveloped set of social skills. Even if pupils with special needs have the capabilities to learn the age-appropriate social skills, their opportunities for learning these may be limited. Research on students’ social relationships shows their preference to associate with similar peers. This has been named as ‘homophily’ (McPherson et al., 2001). Homophily can be based on various dimensions—e.g. age, gender, race, educational attainment, values, interests and/or beliefs. It seems that children with special needs lack the proper qualifications for one or more of the dimensions of homophily, and the effect is that normally developing pupils flock together and tend to exclude those with special needs (Guralnick et al., 1995). It is not clear which dimension is relevant here. It could be the latter’s behaviour, their looks and/or intellectual level. Whatever the motive, the effect is that pupils without special needs prefer to pull together and the same holds true for students with special needs. They also like to be among ‘equals’ (Minnett et al., 1995). The sometimes limited capabilities to develop the social skills needed and the homophily-based grouping of pupils directly threaten many of the notions, intentions and aims behind inclusive education. In 1959, Bank-Mikkelsen introduced the ‘normalization’ principle, that those people with impairments should be able to ‘live a life as close to normal life as possible’ (Hanamura, 1998, p. 74). This was elaborated mainly in terms of de-institutionalization. At that time, social inclusion was not a key issue; it was, however, regarded as important that children with special needs were placed together with their normally developing peers. The OECD (1995, p. 15) defined integration as: the process that maximizes the interaction between disabled and non-disabled pupils. In the development of the concept of ‘inclusive education’ over the past decades, the possibilities for social inclusion have been given more prominence (Booth & Ainscow, 2002). The relation between students became a key issue in inclusive education (Flem & Keller, 2000). Especially parents often state that they expect inclusion to lead primarily to increased opportunities for contact with neighbourhood children, learning to handle social situations and making friends and inclusion in the local community (Strayhorn & Strain, 1986; Sloper & Tyler, 1992). The number of pupils with special needs in inclusive classrooms is generally small and it is unlikely they can relate much to other students with special needs. In order to have a sense of belonging it is therefore essential that they too have positive relations with the other pupils in class. After all, that is what inclusion is ultimately about. The available studies address the (training of) social skills of pupils with special needs, but do not link their social skills to their social position in inclusive classrooms. This issue is the focus of the study reported here.
18 P. Frostad and S. J. Pijl Method Sample The sample consisted of regular primary and lower secondary schools in and around Trondheim, Norway. Norway has a full inclusion policy and today has very few segregated provisions for students with special needs. The great majority participate in regular schools. All schools in the community of Trondheim were invited to participate in the study. In total 26 schools did not react or decided not to take part for various reasons—the main one being that the schools were all too often asked to participate in research studies by various departments from the university and other training institutions. A small study into some of the characteristics of the nonresponding schools was set up (see below). The final sample of schools consisted of 15, with 14 4th-grade (aged 9–10) and 13 7th-grade (aged 12–13) classes. A total of 989 pupils from both grades participated in the data collection: 491 pupils from the 4th grade and 498 from the 7th grade. In the education system in Norway the formal labelling of pupils with special needs is avoided as much as possible; schools vary a great deal from one another in how far they go in abandoning all labelling. As selecting pupils on the basis of a formal statement would result in an incomplete sample, we therefore had to rely on classroom teachers’ judgements. Teachers were asked to give a short description of pupils in their class whom they considered having special educational needs. The teachers identified 42 such pupils in the 4th grade and 37 pupils in the 7th grade, equalling 8.0% of the sample. Of these, 4.2% had a formal statement. Instruments The social position of pupils with special needs in mainstream schools was described using sociometric techniques based on peer nomination. Pupils were asked which pupils in class they considered to be their friends (Pijl et al., 2006). Negative nominations were not asked because these would be regarded as unethical by the teachers involved in the study, resulting in a high number of schools refusing to cooperate. The nomination procedure was based on free recall from the pupils in the same classroom or the same grade (and age). A growing number of schools in Norway have replaced the traditional classroom-based grouping with groups of about 15 pupils (units) within the organization of teaching. Different groups of the same grade work together for different subjects and activities. This broadens the reference group for pupils to all pupils in the same grade in each school. The nominations were limited to a semi-fixed choice (a maximum of five nominations). It is rather usual in peer research to work with a fixed number of nominations (often three), this may introduce error because it is unlikely that all pupils have exactly three best friends (Wasserman & Faust, 1994). We therefore decided to work with a maximum of five nominations and explained clearly that pupils could very well nominate less than five. This seemed an option that restricted the freedom of choice for respondents only minimally.
Social skills of SEN pupils 19 The analyses are based on three different indexes for social inclusion. The first index measures ‘peer acceptance’, based on the number of nominations for the positively phrased question received from group members (‘in degrees’ in social network analysis). Next, we were interested in the friendships pupils had in the group; in line with Cullinan et al. (1992), friendship was elaborated as having one or more mutual relations with other peers in class. Mutuality in relations requires a reciprocal choice, which means that two pupils choose each other as best friend. The third index focused on membership of a cohesive subgroup in class (Farmer & Farmer, 1996). Here we refer to subsets of actors among whom there are relatively strong, direct, intense, frequent or positive ties (Wasserman & Faust, 1994, p. 249). Cullinan et al. (1992) suggest that pupils with special needs are socially included if they are accepted members in class, if they have at least one mutual friendship and if they take part in group activities. This translates roughly into the three indexes introduced earlier. Pupils are then socially included if they are accepted by peers, have at least one mutual relation and belong to a subgroup. Next to establishing the social position of pupils we also described their social skills using the elementary norms of the Social skills rating system (SSRS: Gresham & Elliot, 1990), which address cooperation, assertion, empathy and self-control. The subscale cooperation addresses behaviours such as helping others, sharing materials and complying with rules and directions. Assertion has to do with initiating behaviours such as asking others for information, introducing oneself and responding to peer pressure or insults. Empathy focuses on behaviours that show concern and respect for others’ feelings and point of view. The subscale self-control covers behaviours that emerge in situations that require taking turns and compromising (Gresham & Elliot, 1990, p. 2). The scale consists of 34 items. A total of six items are counted in two subscales, resulting in subscale raw scores ranging from 0 to 10 and a maximum scale raw score of 40. The age range of the SSRT elementary form fitted the age range of our sample. Ogden (1995) translated the elementary form of the Social skills rating system into Norwegian and tested it; the overall reliability of the Norwegian version was comparable to the reliability reported by Gresham and Elliot (1990) (overall reliability of the student form: 0.83); but factor analysis failed to reproduce the subtest structure reported by Gresham and Elliot (1990). Ogden concluded that 28 of the 34 test items contributed to the same factor and that the test should be interpreted as one overall measure of social skills. We used Ogden’s version of the SSRS. Each of the scale items were read aloud to pupils by the test leader. The test data were gathered by the authors and three students working on their Master’s thesis in pedagogy. Analyses The sociometric data were analysed using UCINET software (Borgatti et al., 1999). Three indexes for social position were constructed, the first based on the absolute number of nominations from group members, the second on the absolute number of reciprocal relations and the third on membership of a so-called n-clique (n = 2) (Wasserman & Faust, 1994).
20 P. Frostad and S. J. Pijl The Norwegian version of the student form of the Social skills rating system gives one the overall social skills score (Ogden, 1995). Factor analysis was performed to ascertain if this held for our dataset. The indexes for social inclusion were correlated with the social skills scores. The analyses of the relation between social inclusion and social skills were based on the whole study sample. The three indexes for social position can refer theoretically to different concepts (Gest et al., 2001) and each therefore was used in the social skills analyses. The second phase of the analyses focused especially on the relation between social position and social skills of pupils with special needs.
Results Teacher and class characteristics A selection of the schools and teachers not responding or refusing to cooperate were invited to answer a few questions. In total 20 teachers from a select sample of ten of the non-responding schools answered the questions by phone. The same questions were answered by the teachers in our study. The questionnaire consisted of 14 questions addressing certain teacher characteristics (age, training and experience) and the degree in which teachers felt supported in implementing inclusion in their class. Examples of the 11 scaled questions concerning attitude included: ‘Do you feel supported by your colleagues in including all pupils in your class?’ and ‘Do you believe that you have sufficient resources to include all pupils in your class?’ All item total correlations were positive and sufficient and the scale’s reliability was 0.83. The non-responding group had a higher average on the scale compared to the responding teachers. On a scale of 1 to 6 the non-responding group had a mean score of 4.0 and the responding group 3.4 (p≤0.00), which meant that the schools in our sample did not over-represent the best and most self-confident schools in the municipality. Comparison of both datasets further showed that both groups did not differ much in regard to mean age (respectively 41 versus 45), in mean years of experience (respectively 15.3 versus 17.1) and in the percentage of teachers with additional training in special needs education (respectively 45% versus 38%). In the Trondheim municipality 4.5% of all pupils have a statement, while in our sample 4.2% had statements. The comparison of the non-responding school with our sample showed there were no reasons to assume any systematic bias in the sample under study. Pupils with special needs Schools in Norway can request additional resources for educating pupils with special needs. These resources are granted on the basis of a formal decision (‘enkelt vedtak’). This decision could, in theory, be used as a definition of special needs, a practice not unlike the one in many other countries (Meijer, 2003). However, some of the schools in Norway have decided to avoid labelling and this results in a very different use of formal statements as a means to obtain additional resources. Having a formal
Social skills of SEN pupils 21 statement is therefore not a good selection criterion and we had to rely on class teachers’ judgements. Teachers were asked to give a short description of the pupils in their class whom they considered to have special educational needs. Teachers identified 42 such pupils in the 4th grade and 37 pupils in the 7th grade (8% of the sample). As usual, boys were overrepresented (69.6%). Teachers’ descriptions of pupils with special needs showed that 26 of these were identified as having serious behaviour problems, 24 as pupils with moderate or severe learning problems, 14 as having mild learning problems and nine with communication problems. The remainder (six) had sensorial difficulties or motor impairments. Social position The analyses focused on the social position of pupils with special needs compared to those of their normally developing peers. Acceptance was operationalized as the number of positive nominations received from peers. Pupils with special needs in the 4th grade had an average of 2.6 nominations and in the 7th grade 2.3. The average number of nominations received by pupils without special needs was significantly higher (p
