Beware Of Popular Kids Bearing Gifts: A Framed Field Experiment - Jignan Chen, Daniel Houser, Natalia Montinari, And Marco Piovesan (Interdisciplinary Center For Economic Science, George Mason University) Page 11

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would know which names they wrote. Children received a rubber band for their
collaboration.
Using the names the children reported, we created an index of popularity to use in our
analysis. Note that, in each grade, the children had been in the same class for at least
seven months, from September 2011 to March 2012 (i.e., since the beginning of the
school term, which in Italy starts the first week of September). We consider this to be a
sufficient time period for them to have established networks.
Approximately one week before the experiment, we distributed to the children’s parents
(or legal guardians) a flyer with a description of our study (we call this activity) and
asked them to sign a consent form in which they agreed that their child would participate
in the study. In addition, we asked parents to answer an anonymous questionnaire using
the same ID given to the child during the experiment. In this questionnaire, we asked
information about: i) the family (e.g., country of origin, marital status and education of
the parents; number of children in the family and their age, etc.); ii) the child’s
extracurricular activities (e.g., sports and hobbies, group versus individual activities, use
of TV and PC, whether the child had a cellular phone, the amount of weakly allowance
(if any), etc.). We also administered the strengths and difficulties questionnaire (SDQ), a
questionnaire validated by Goodman (1997), which is used to elicit information about the
child’s emotional symptoms, conduct problems, hyperactivity/inattention, and peer
relationship problems. While parents could refuse to answer all or part of this
questionnaire, their child could participate only if his/her parents signed the consent form.
V. Results
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Popularity Elicitation Protocol Using the data collected from the “Seating Map,
”, we
constructed a popularity index for each kid ! in his/her class
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. We first counted the
number of children in one class who indicated a particular child in their “Seating Map”;
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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The seating map used is reproduced in Figure A1.2 in the Appendix.
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In the instructions, the children were told to write down (up to) five names of other children in the SAME
class; therefore, the popularity measured here is based on class level. See the Script used reproduced in the
Appendix A.1.
!
9!

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