A Circumplex Model for Social Behavior in Children1,2

Abstract

A method of analyzing the social behavior of children with the aim of maximizing the interpretability, the meaningfulness of the construct generated, and the interpretability of correlations between parent and child behavior has been presented. The method fuses the traditional approach to factor analysis with the circumplex approach developed by Guttman and recently applied by Schaefer to the child behavior area. Re-analyses of child behavior data gathered by several other people were presented to show the more general applicability of the approach. Finally, a set of data on mothers and fathers with 5year-olds was re-analyzed to illustrate the improvement in clarity and meaningfulness of the results obtained when the method was applied to the data.