183 -- 7-Year-Olds’ Associative and Cooperative Play with Sibling and Friends

As part of a longitudinal study, we examined rates of associative and cooperative play in 7-year-olds’ interactions with siblings and friends during free play, a construction task, and a board game. Associative play consists of mutual social engagement, but without a common goal. Cooperative play involves more intense social engagement–a joint activity with a common goal. The nature of their social engagement depended on their relationship with their play partner, the task at hand, and gender. Our group wanted to examine what task facilitated the most cooperation. We hypothesized that construction would be most effective at getting the participants to work together. However, our experiences in coding videos made us consider this more seriously. Our examination of our data showed that construction did not facilitate cooperation. Also since middle childhood friendships are typically more intimate and harmonious than sibling relationships; we anticipated that friends would spend more time in associative and cooperative play than siblings. As expected, on all three tasks, friends engaged in more associative and cooperative play than siblings. These findings will help us as we continue to examine relationships in our data.