The Situated Nature of Preschool Children's Conflict Strategies

The purpose of this study was to examine whether the peer conflict strategies of preschool children are situated and therefore vary across different conflict situations. Hypothetical conflict interviews were administered through a series of puppet shows. Participants were 178 preschool children. Results indicate that preschool children's conflict management skills are situated in peer conflict, because their strategies are to a greater or lesser degree influenced by the opponent's strategies. When the opponent's conflict strategy is non-aggressive, aggressive conflict strategies are atypical and low in frequency. When the opponent behaves with physical aggression in the conflict situation, most of the subjects respond to this aggressive conflict strategy with physical aggression. The findings confirm neither a static individual view nor a situated determinism, but a situated action view in which both individuals' cognitions and distributed cognitions interact. Conflict can be defined as a state of resistance or opposition between two or more individuals (Shantz & Hartup, 1992). It is, according to Isheden, Abdollazadeh, and Faresveit (1995), a state of incompatible behaviours or goals. Conflict can also be defined as a relationship where two people have incompatible goals, and use a variety of prosocial and antisocial strategies to influence each other's behaviour (Malloy & McMurray, 1996). Some of the researchers describe the conflict as at least a three-unit exchange (e.g., Laursen & Hartup, 1989; Shantz, 1987). 1. A influences B with an act or a verbal utterance. 2. B resists this influence. 3. A attempts once again to influence B. Not until this third turn does the opposition become mutual. Peer conflicts between preschool children are a familiar form of social interaction, and young children often resolve peer conflicts on their own, without any adult intervention (Shantz, 1987). According to Rizzo (1992), peer conflicts give children an opportunity to develop their relations to each other. These conflicts represent a type of everyday social situation with a considerable effect on the development of social competence (Dunn & Slomkowski, 1992). Conflict management skills are associated with the formation and maintenance of friendships (Gottman, 1983; Rose & Asher, 1999), successful peer group entry (Putallaz & Sheppard, 1992), and increased perspective taking and social understanding (Dunn & Slomkowski, 1992); Katz, Kramer, & Gottman, 1992). It is also associated with the development of moral skills, including the ability to coordinate the needs of the self with the needs of others (Killen & Nucci, 1999). The importance of developing and using appropriate and prosocial conflict strategies should not be underestimated. A permanent use of inappropriate strategies can result in difficulties in peer relations, such as aggression, victimisation, and peer rejection (Perry, Perry, & Kennedy, 1992). However, both social competence in general and conflict management skills in particular could in sociocultural terms be considered as situated skills. Thoughts, communication, and physical acts, according to the sociocultural view, are situated in contexts (Säljö, 2000). Children's social competence and conflict strategies in these terms are not something invariant and unaffected by the context. Their conflict strategies should instead vary across different situations. The theoretical explanation of situated actions is, according to Lave (1988; Lave & Wengler, 1991) and Säljö (2000), that different social situations contain different structuring resources. The structuring resources in the actual situation guide the child to orientate him/herself in the situation, and scaffold the child's actions. The individual child's conflict management skills are therefore not confined to the child's character or internal cognition, but exist in the structuring resources of the situation as well, and are distributed by other people, tools, activity, and the physical milieu involved in the situation. The sociocultural term “distributed cognition” means that knowledge, thinking, and skills are distributed or mediated in the interactions of people, tools, and milieu. This concept emphasises the impact of the activity on the situation rather than just the internal activity in the head of the subject (Cole & Engeström, 1997; Pea, 1997; Salomon, 1997; Wertsch, Tulviste, & Hagstrom, 1996). A child's learning and development processes are interdependent, and consequences of the child in social activities with others (Moll & Whitmore, 1996). Taking a sociocultural view, therefore, peer conflict situations should not only mean that the children involved think and act in a situated way, guided and scaffolded by structuring resources in the situations and by socially distributed cognitions. According to a sociocultural view, peer conflict situations include situated learning processes in which children master and appropriate conflict management skills, also guided and scaffolded by structuring resources and socially distributed cognitions. Also, taking a social cognition or social informational processing view, the information in the situation and in the social interaction is of course a main influence upon the child's thinking and actions (Crick & Dodge, 1994; Lemerise & Arsenio, 2000). In their social informationprocessing model of children's social adjustment, Crick and Dodge (1994) write about what they call situational cues. Children selectively attend to particular situational cues, encode those cues, and then interpret them. After interpreting the situation, the children select a goal or desired outcome for the situation (e.g., staying out of trouble, getting even with a provocateur, making a friend, or getting a desired toy) or continue with a pre-existing goal. It is proposed that the children bring goal tendencies to the social situation but also revise those goals and construct new goals in response to immediate social information or cues. They access possible responses from memory to the situation, or may (especially if the situation is novel) construct new behaviours in response to immediate social cues. In the model, the relation between social information processing and social adjustment is a reciprocal one. Both external or situational cues and the children's own mental database of social knowledge matter. Children rely on cognitive heuristics or schemata to help them interpret the situational cues experienced in social situations. Most processing is of course not conscious or reflective, but highly automated. Although Crick and Dodge (1994) assert that emotion is an important component of social information processing, they also acknowledge that the role of emotion is not well articulated in their model. Lemerise and Arsenio (2000) proposed a revised model in which emotion processes are explicitly integrated into Crick and Dodge's model. Additionally, in this revised model, situational or external cues are a main influence on the child's processing of social information. Lemerise and Arsenio add that affective cues from others in the situation (which of course can be seen as a form of situational cue) are an important source of information that will influence the social information processing. For example, provocateurs' anger cues in the context of ambiguous provocation facilitate hostile attributions (Lemerise & Arsenio, 2000). According to social cognition research, aggression cues (e.g., the presence of a weapon or salient hostile verbalisations) in a situation seem to activate cognitive schemata related to aggression and thus increase the salience of aggressive response options (Carlson, Marcus-Newhall, & Miller, 1990; Johnson & Downing, 1979; Krahé, 2001). It is possible to hypothesise that anger cues or aggressive behaviour from an opponent in a conflict situation can function as aggression cues and therefore increase the likelihood of aggressive responses. Research into preschool children's conflict management skills has shown that the children do not use strategies randomly, but in response to the strategies of their opponent (Eisenberg & Garvey, 1981; Ross & Conant, 1992). Eisenberg and Garvey's (1981) study shows that insistence is highly likely to lead the partner to respond with insistence, and reasons are more likely to be met with a concession to the speaker's point of view and less likely to be met with rigid demands. Physical strategies such as reaching for, grasping, and pulling the object that both want are often followed by similar physical strategies, and verbal strategies are often followed by verbal strategies (Ross & Conant, 1992). Conflicts in which children simply insist, or use other strategies that lead to a relative lack of information from which compromise and conciliation could be derived, have been called “simple”, and these conflict sequences generally escalate in nature. Conflicts that include reasoning and attempts to compromise can be called “elaborate”, because they contain strategies that give the partner information about the speaker's perspective and which resolutions the speaker may find reasonable. This elaborate reasoning more often tends to lead to resolution compared to simple verbal messages. Simple strategies lead to simple strategies, and elaborate strategies lead to elaborate strategies (Ross & Conant, 1992). In general, peer conflicts are usually resolved by insistence resulting in a win-lose outcome (Laursen & Hartup, 1989). In this paper the term “discursive information” will be used to refer to complex and elaborate conflict strategies. The concept includes arguing, reasoning, information in order to negotiate, and information/reasoning that gives more detail about the perspective of the speaker (e.g., to give justifications or reasons, suggest alternative proposals, verbalise feelings, refer to rules, or suggest compromise in the form of turn-taking or sharing). Research has also shown that physical aggression is an atypical, low frequency behaviour in peer conflicts among preschool children (Eisenberg & Garvey, 1981; Hartup & Laursen, 1993; Isheden et al., 1995; Killen & Nucci, 1999; Laursen & Hartup, 1989; Perry et al., 1992; Ross & Conant, 1992; Vespo, Pedersen, & Hay, 1995). But are aggressive conflict strategies really atypical if the opponent acts or reacts in the conflict with physical aggression? If conflict management skills are situated, it is possible to hypothesise that aggressive strategies usually lead to aggressive strategies. This hypothetical situated action, according to the sociocultural view, may be explained in terms of structuring resources and distributed cognition. According to a social cognition view, the children's processing of social information could be seen as influenced by the aggression cues in the situation. These kinds of situational cues may activate hostile or aggressive schemata, facilitate hostile attributions, and/or may be used as a direct model for constructing behaviour. The purpose of the present study was to examine if the peer conflict strategies of preschool children are situated and therefore varying across different conflict situations. Hypothetical conflict interviews were administered through a series of puppet shows.