Perceived athletic competence, sociometric status, and loneliness in elementary school children.

Loneliness has been characterized as an individual's "cognitive awareness of a deficiency in one's social and personal relationships ... [that is accompanied by] ensuing affective reactions of sadness, emptiness, or longing" (Asher & Paquette, 2003, p.75). Parkhurst and Hopmeyer (1999) have further defined loneliness as "a sad or aching sense of isolation ... [that corresponds with] a felt deprivation of, [and] longing for, association, contact, or closeness [with other people]" (p.58). According to Galanski and Kalantzi-Azizi (1999), when children are asked to define loneliness they typically refer to their peer group as a reference point and view loneliness as a state in which one is without friends that can result in feelings of sadness (e.g., Cassidy & Asher, 1992). Overall, loneliness for children reflects interpersonal deficits that are the result of having fewer or less satisfying personal relationships with other children than desired (Ponzetti, 1990).

Research consistently indicates that there are many psychosocial and emotional problems associated with loneliness in childhood and adolescence (Kristensen, 1995). Studies with elementary school aged children reveal that lonely children are less physically active and less fit (Page, Frey, Talbert, & Falk, 1992) and more likely to experience tension and anxiety (Page, 1991) than their non-lonely counterparts. In adolescence, loneliness has been linked to a variety of potentially health-threatening recreational behaviors including cigarette smoking and marijuana use (Page, 1990). If loneliness persists for a prolonged period of time during childhood (i.e., chronic loneliness), there is an increased risk of school drop out, depression, and alcoholism in late adolescence and early adulthood (Asher & Paquette, 2003). Clearly, prolonged loneliness has the potential to seriously undermine an individual's psychological, emotional, and physical well-being. As such, understanding the correlates of loneliness and identifying factors that can potentially decrease the likelihood of experiencing loneliness for children becomes an important research endeavor.

Research on children's loneliness has been dominated by a focus on the influence of sociometric status within the peer system (Asher & Paquette, 2003). The term "sociometric status" is often used interchangeably with other terms such as peer acceptance, social acceptance, or peer status (Weiss & Stuntz, 2004). At its most basic level, sociometric status refers to the degree to which children are liked or disliked by other children within the peer group (Gifford-Smith & Brownell, 2003). Unlike friendship, which represents a bilateral view of experiences between two specific individuals, sociometric status represents a general group-oriented unilateral view that describes how a peer group regards one of its members (Weiss & Stuntz).

Peer acceptance at school is often assessed by having children nominate peers they would most like and least like to play with, or by asking children to indicate on rating scales the extent to which they like or dislike each of their classroom peers (Cillessen & Bukowski, 2000). Irrespective of the measurement technique employed, sociometric categories are then created in an attempt to describe the child's sociometric status within the peer group. By subtracting the number of negative nominations from the number of positive nominations, a child's likeability (or level of social acceptance) by the group is calculated. Children who are rated as popular are well liked by their peers and seldom disliked (i.e., they receive many positive nominations and few negative nominations). In contrast, children who receive many least-like nominations and few most-like nominations are classified as rejected children.

Research strongly supports a link between sociometric status and loneliness in children, especially among children who are rejected by their peers. Rejected children are frequently subjected to physical and verbal harassment (Boivin & Hymel, 1997) and are often excluded from social activities by the peer group (Buhs & Ladd, 2001). Rejected children also have a tendency to disengage from the social environment as a way of avoiding further abuse (Coie & Kupersmidt, 1983). Theorists suggest that rejected children may therefore be exposed to a larger number of social isolation experiences (i.e., loneliness-provoking situations) in their daily lives (Hymel, Tarulli, Thomson, & Terrell-Deutsch, 1999) which in turn increases the degree of loneliness experienced by the child. Thus, it is not surprising that empirical research consistently finds that rejected children experience higher levels of loneliness than their more popular peers (e.g., Asher & Wheeler, 1985; Crick, Grotpeter, & Rockhill, 1999; Parker & Asher, 1993; Parkhurst & Asher, 1992).

Although many factors can potentially contribute to loneliness experiences (e.g., death of a parent or significant other, family relocation), routine rejection by peers is clearly one of the most critical factors that contribute to children's feelings of loneliness (Bullock, 1993; Crick & Grotpeter, 1996). It therefore becomes important to identify and understand factors that may increase a child's likelihood of being accepted by the peer group, which in turn decreases the likelihood of experiencing the destructive psychosocial and emotional problems that often occur in conjunction with rejection. Athletic ability or athletic competence may be one such factor (see Kunesh, Hasbrook, & Lewthwaite, 1992; Page & Scanlan, 1994; Weiss & Duncan, 1992).

Research in sport and physical activity settings has shown that children who demonstrate athletic competence and who hold positive beliefs about their own athletic abilities tend to be more popular with their peers than less skilled children (Rose, Larkin, & Berger, 1997; Weiss & Duncan, 1992). In contrast, children who are poorly skilled often become the target of criticism (Portman, 1995), ridicule and bullying (Fitzpatrick & Watkinson, 2003; Mandich, Polatajko, & Roger, 2003), and exclusion (Evans & Roberts, 1987; Mandich et al., 2003). Positions reflecting higher social standing among children within their social system (i.e., leadership positions) also are afforded to more capable athletes. For example, Evans and Roberts (1987) observed team selection among third through sixth grade boys in the playground. Interviews with the boys about this selection revealed that those who were viewed as having the highest sport ability were typically elected as captains, whereas less skilled boys were generally chosen much later in the selection process, and sometimes even excluded (i.e., "locked out") from the game entirely.