In this study, we sought to create and validate a brief measure to assess students' perceptions of kindness in school. Participants included 1,753 students in Grades 4 to 8 attending public schools in a large school district in southern British Columbia. The School Kindness Scale (SKS) demonstrated a unidimensional factor structure and adequate…

The purpose of this study was to identify and validate subtypes of peer status by integrating preference and popularity into a single framework. Person-oriented analyses were performed among 3,630 children and adolescents of different cohorts in primary and secondary education. In the young age groups (Grade 3/4 to Grade 7), three clusters were…

There is a dearth of published research on the role of intergroup contact on urban US ethnic minority children's and adolescents' evaluations of racial exclusion. The current investigation examined these issues in a sample of low-income minority 4th, 7th, and 10th grade (N = 129, 60% female) African American and Latino/a students attending…

Social cliques start around fourth or fifth grade and get worse through middle school and beyond. The cool vs. the uncool. Nerds, jocks, popular kids and outsiders--students are categorized by their peers and excluded by those different from them. Students who are not part of the "cool" crowd feel isolated and lonely and are often subjected to…