ABSTRACT
Despite an ever increasing literature on children's peer relations (e.g., Asher & Coie, 1990, Berndt & Ladd, 1989; Rubin & Ross, 1982; Schneider, Rubin, & Ledingham, 1985; Wine & Smye, 1981), the child's perspective on his or her social difficulties has been a relatively neglected topic (Hymel & Franke, 1985). This general failure is at least in part attributable to the fact that researchers generally question the validity of children's self reports, owing primarily to evidence indicating rather positive bias in children's self evaluations (see Kagan, Hans, Markowitz, Lopez, & Sigal, 1982). When one considers the child's perspective, self appraisals and self assessments, by necessity, are of primary interest. However, self-report measures have and do receive mixed reviews as an assessment tool within psychology. As Beharry (1990) has pointed out, self-report measures are often regarded as biased, unreliable, and inaccurate, making them a less than adequate scientific tool. Such concern is not entirely unwarranted, according to Beharry; after all, self-report data is not necessarily a true reflection of behavior and, more often than not, bears little relationship to objective observations of behavior (Hetherington & Parke, 1986; Kochanska, Kuczynski, & Radke-Yarrow, 1989) or to evaluations by others (e.g., Hymel, Woody, Ditner, & LeMare, 1988; Shrauger & Schoeneman, 1979). Moreover, Kagan (1984) notes that "because so much information is viewed by the person as evaluative of self, a verbal report is often an extremely distorted sign of the essential quality the scientist wishes to know in its less disguised form" (p. 24).
