An interview
We chatted with Andrea Schmidt about her recently accepted paper titled, “Evaluating Sociometer Theory in Children’s Everyday Lives: Inclusion, but not Exclusion by Peers at School is Related to Within-Day Change in Self-Esteem”, which will be published in an upcoming issue of EJP. Andrea is a post-doctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education.
Read on to learn more about Andrea’s work on social inclusion and exclusion in the daily lives of kids and the relation to self-esteem!
Q: Hello Andrea! Can you tell us a bit about who you are and what made you become interested in studying personality psychology?
I studied psychology at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany and I recently completed my PhD at DIPF | Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education in Frankfurt, in the research group of professor Florian Schmiedek. To this day, I’m still working there as a post-doctoral researcher. I’m also studying to become a psychotherapist for children and adolescents and this is why I always see things through clinical eyes as well.
My research mainly focuses on the relations among social interactions, affective well-being and self-esteem as a component of personality. My interest in self-esteem developed when I started my PhD. I was in a large project and they were like, “Okay, what are you interested in? What are you going to do?” I was reading many papers and I was fascinated by self-esteem because I think it’s so important what you think of yourself. Self-esteem plays a major role for mental health, with low self-esteem being a potential risk factor for the development of many psychological disorders and high self-esteem being a potential resilience factor. I’m especially curious about childhood because it is during this time that children begin to form a sense of self-esteem, referring to this subjective evaluation of their own value.
Another construct that I’m focusing on in my research is children’s belongingness to peers at school, meaning how children interact with classmates, whether they feel liked, or whether they experience social exclusion. I think social interactions affect how you see yourself but how you see yourself also influences how you interact with others – for example, when you are satisfied with yourself and think you are likeable, you probably get into contact with others in a self-confident way, without thinking about it too much.. I think feeling related and connected to other people is really important for your daily well-being and also in the long run for your mental health and trait self-esteem.
I quickly became interested in how these everyday momentary experiences in childhood and adolescence might contribute to how people become the way they are and why people differ from each other. In my studies, I therefore examine children in their daily lives, using ambulatory assessment with smartphones. This means that children respond to self-report items multiple times per day across timespans of up to four weeks. For example, we ask them how they feel or what they have experienced in the last hours. I’ve focused on the age group of 9 to 12 year-olds, because they are still developing and are probably still trying to find out who they are.
Q: What do you like to do outside of work?
I really like to do yoga, to relax my mind and to do something good for the muscles as a compensation for sitting behind the computer all day. And also to just focus on myself for ninety minutes. Because of COVID-19, my yoga classes take place via Zoom. This allows me to do yoga together with my sister who lives in Cologne, about two hundred kilometers away, so I really love that!
I also really enjoy spending my time outside by going for a walk by the river nearby or hiking on the weekend or during holidays. In August, my partner and I spent a week in a small village in the Black Forest close to Switzerland and we really enjoyed that a lot. We took hiking tours through nature, past waterfalls, and across the highlands, which is in complete contrast to the hectic pace of Frankfurt. I also think this is one of the very few upsides of COVID-19; that you get to discover spots in your home country that you probably wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.
Above all, I love spending my free time with my partner, my family, and my friends. My research showed me that feeling connected to other people and having a good time with them is strongly linked to happiness and being satisfied with oneself. So I try to apply that in my personal life!
Q: Can you tell us about your study?
In this research, I investigated whether children’s self-esteem is linked to their social experiences with peers at school using ambulatory assessment in children’s everyday lives. I examined this question in three intensive longitudinal studies with children aged 9 to 12. Using a repeated measures design allowed us to examine processes that unfold within children over time.
We asked children up to four times a day to answer questions on smartphones provided by us. For instance about how they feel at that moment, whether they are satisfied with themselves, and what they have experienced at school. There was one study with a two-week duration and two studies with a four-week duration each. And for the third study, I pre-registered in the Open Science Framework that I expected perceived social inclusion to be linked to higher self-esteem in the evening and to an increase in self-esteem across the day. I also expected perceived social exclusion to be linked to lower self-esteem in the evening and a decrease in self-esteem across the day.
Consistently across the three studies, we found that on days when children experienced higher social inclusion by peers than they usually did, they reported higher self-esteem in the evening. On days when they experienced higher inclusion, they also showed a positive shift in self-esteem from before to after school. So on days when children felt more included at school (i.e., they felt more liked by classmates and enjoyed playing with them more than they typically did), their self-evaluations improved from morning to evening.
Unexpectedly, we did not find social exclusion (i.e., feeling picked on at school, feeling teased or fighting with a classmate) to be related to a lower level of self-esteem in the evening or to a drop in self-esteem across the day. In our paper we elaborate on different possible explanations for why we did not find daily social exclusion to be related to children’s self-esteem. For instance, the timing of the assessments may have played a role. We measured children’s state self-esteem in the morning before school and in the evening, several hours after school. Therefore it is possible that children who experienced social exclusion by classmates immediately started to cope with these experiences, which may result in a restored level of self-esteem in the evening. Likewise, it is possible that children who felt excluded at school compensated for such experiences by meeting their friends in the afternoon.
Furthermore, our data suggest that for some children social exclusion was indeed associated with lower self-esteem. We found significant differences in the strength of the association between children (although not finding a significant average effect). To explain these between-person differences, we examined age, gender, mean social inclusion, mean social exclusion, and mean self-esteem across the duration of the study. Although we found moderation effects for the link between social inclusion and self-esteem, we were not able to explain differences in the link between social exclusion and self-esteem. One other variable that may moderate the relation is how important classmates are to children. I can imagine that when a child does not have a lot of social contact in the afternoon (e.g., they are not in a sports team and not taking music or dancing lessons), their classmates are really important for them. However, children who do have lots of afternoon activities may not care so much about what happens at school because their important peers are in their sports team.
Summing up, our findings emphasize the power of the good. They imply that feeling liked by classmates and having a good time with them at school has the potential to foster being satisfied with oneself, liking oneself, and perceiving oneself as worthy already in childhood. Assuming that a person’s trait self-esteem refers to the accumulation of all self-esteem states, this suggests that children’s trait self-esteem emerges out of these everyday experiences of social inclusion in the long run. Previous research has shown that trait self-esteem is important for so many positive outcomes, such as later mental and physical health, or academic success. As such, our findings underline the relevance of children’s positive social experiences at school for a range of long-term positive outcomes.
For me, the most important implication from this research is not to always focus only on the bad. Our research shows that positive experiences have the potential to promote positive things, such as happiness and being satisfied with yourself. So the bad is not always stronger than the good, but the good is very important as well.
Q: Out of curiosity, how did you manage to keep compliance up across four weeks
We put a lot of effort into maintaining children’s motivation to participate in the study. We used a gamification approach, meaning that study participation was implemented in a game. There is a protagonist called Sascha whose task it is to find so-called “Murkse”, little fantasy creatures. When children filled out questionnaires on the smartphone, they gained marbles. With these marbles, they could buy Sascha stuff to wear that will allow Sascha to hide better in certain universes (there was a different universe for each of the four weeks of data collection). When Sascha hides very well, the fantasy creatures will pop up on the screen. We also had an accompanying sticker book, combining the smartphone world with the real world. So we regularly drove to the schools and gave each participating child stickers of the Murkse that he or she had found in the online world. I think this really helped to maintain compliance, because it was fun for children.
Q: What’s next for you?
At this moment, I’m starting a new project that I got funding for. In past (and the present research), I focused on social interactions at school and I think this is really important because the school is such a big part of children’s daily life. But I was wondering if I am missing something when only focusing on the school context. Therefore I wanted to also assess what children do in the afternoon on social media. Many children have a WhatsApp group for the class and there are probably also different subgroups of children with their own WhatsApp group. I want to examine what the kinds of interactions are that are happening online.
I also want to examine whether there might be some spillover to the school context because online chatting has a lower threshold of social exclusion. That is, because you are hiding behind a screen, it’s much easier to tease someone online. I can imagine that it might start online in a class group on WhatsApp or in different subgroups that children get teased. But it might also spill over to the school context; when you are already picking on someone online, it might also be easier to continue with it at school. In addition, I want to see whether positive social encounters make it easier to come into contact with others. It might be that children who are very shy can get into contact with others online although they do not dare to approach them in real life. And also how this relates to self-esteem and how children feel about themselves.
In March and April, we have also done a 21-day diary study on family’s psychological adjustment to the COVID-19 pandemic, initiated and supervised by my colleague Andreas Neubauer. The study was conducted in Germany, during a time when schools were closed to slow down the spread of the virus. I focused on social interactions between children and their parents in the context of homeschooling. It was really interesting to see what happens in family dynamics. The paper is still under review, but the preprint is already available online. The main findings were that on days when children were working on school tasks at home, parents reported more negative parent-child interactions, lower parental and child positive affect, and higher child negative affect. Examining homeschooling more closely, we found that on days when parents were more heavily involved in their children’s learning, they reported more negative parent-child interactions and lower affective well-being of both, parents and children. The paper thus illustrates the negative consequences of school closures on the parent-child dyad and the daily well-being of both.
Q: Do you have any tips or advice for young researchers?
I think my tips are not specific for the field of personality psychology, but maybe for doing your PhD in general. First, take notes of every little thought that comes to mind and every discussion you have. This tip also applies to code that you write; I strongly suggest you also comment your code. Because one is more forgetful than one thinks – or at least I am!
Another thing I had to learn during my PhD is that there is no such thing as the perfect time to go on holidays. And if you wait for such a time, you may never take a break! There are always things to do, papers to read, studies to plan, manuscripts to write. However, I think it is important to take some time off and it may actually inspire you and provide you with new ideas or a new perspective. Therefore, taking a holiday may actually be beneficial for your research. So my tip would be to not underestimate the positive effects of holidays on your research and to not hesitate to take some time off even though there may be no perfect timing.
Q: Who is your favorite young scholar and why?
This is a really tough question; there are so many inspiring researchers that are doing amazing jobs. I think one researcher who inspired and taught me a lot is a good colleague of mine, Andreas Neubauer. He is an excellent researcher who combines a conceptual readiness of mind with statistical expertise and super high efficiency!
But apart from nominating a specific person, I would like to say that I absolutely admire and owe my respect to all women and men who manage to be loving parents on the one hand and manage to pursue a career in academia on the other hand. With academia being such a competitive area, you have to invest a lot of time and effort in order to keep up with new developments, to publish as many high-quality papers in excellent journals as possible, to extend your network, and to continuously improve your skills. Nevertheless, there are many young scholars who manage to balance all these high demands with raising their children in the loving and caring way they deserve. I hope I’m able to follow these examples in the future.