Quarrel involvement of school-aged children: gender differences, age trends, and school adjustment correlates.

How quarrel involvement (QI) relates to social likeability (SL) and scholastic attainment (SA) was investigated in a group of 201 Israeli school-aged children, boys and girls, from Grades 2, 4, and 6. QI as well as SL scores were obtained from peer ratings, and SA was rated by home-class teachers. The results indicate significant gender differences in QI, with boys being consistently rates as more involved in quarrels than girls. No overall developmental trend in QI was found. Very high correlations between peer ratings of QI submitted by boy raters and by girl raters indicate that QI was a reliably assessable personal characteristic. A clear inverse relation between QI and SL was found for both boys and girls from both cross-gender and within-gender perspectives, the only exception being a lack of such a relation for girls in fourth and sixth grades from the boys' perspective. A clear inverse relation between QI and SA was found for boys in all grade levels. This relation held only for girls in second grade, not for girls in fourth and sixth grades.