Analysis of Dimensions of Prosocial Behavior in Argentine’s Children and Adolescents

MARÍA CRISTINA RICHAUD; BELÉN MESURADO; ANA KOHAN CORTADA

Montreal

Congreso; 2011 SRCD Biennial Meeting; 2011

Society for Research in Child Development

The existing measures of prosocial behaviors are divided in global and situationspecific measures. There is evidence that there are different types of prosocial behaviors that have different personal and situational correlates. Carlo and Randall (2002) proposed six kinds of prosocial behaviors: (1) Altruistic: voluntary helping motivated primarily by concern for the need and welfare of others, (2) Compliant: helping others in response to request (3) Emotional: helping others under emotionally evocative circumstances (4) Public: conducted, at least in part, by a desire to gain the approval and respect of others and enhance one’s self-worth (5) Anonymous: performed without knowledge of whom is helped (6) Dire: helping in crisis or emergency circumstances. In a recent study Richaud et al. (2010) found that the Altruistic is intrinsically motivated and associated with parental acceptance. Anonymous appears positively associated with Material Rewards that gives it a sense of extrinsic motivation. Public is only associated with the extrinsic motivation of deriving benefit looking well with others and it is related to parental Negligence and Material rewards. However, the results corresponding to Compliance, Dire and Emotional were no clear. From a psychometric point of view, the factors corresponding to Compliant and Dire (Carlo & Randall, 2002), seem to be residuals due to the low variance accounted for. The objective of this work is to factor analyze the results of administering the Prosocial Tendencies Measure to 470 middle class Argentine’s children from 10 to 16 years (M= 12.41, SD= 1.57), of both sexes, to determine how many factors or dimensions could explain the prosocial behavior. Children completed the Prosocial Tendencies Measure (PTM) (Carlo & Randall, 2002) translated and back-translated for the Argentinean sample. To control the influence of age, three varimax rotated principal components exploratory factor analyses were conducted: 1) for the total sample, 2) for 10 and 11 years, and 3) for 11 to 16 years. Four distinct factors emerged in all three analyses (Table 1). When comparing the model of four factors with that of six factors through confirmatory factor analysis, we found that the two models fit the data very well (Table2). However, the six factors model showed correlations of above .90 among the factors Dire, Compliant and Emotional, which indicates that these three factors are redundant. We could say that prosocial behavior has four principal dimensions: altruistic, public, anonymous, and responsive. The first one is related with intrinsic motivation to help based on positive internal affective processes. Public is only associated with the extrinsic motivation of deriving benefit from others. Anonymous although is performed without knowledge of whom helped, has a sense of extrinsic motivation. Dire, Emotional and Compliant would seem to be elicited by an intense external demand: a serious crisis, a strong emotional state of another person, or a concrete request. All three prosocial behaviors seem to be sub dimensions of a general behavior that we call Responsive prosocial behavior.