“Analysis of Dimensions of Prosocial Behavior in Argentine's Children and Youngers”,

, LUIS; KOHAN CORTADA, ANA; PIEMONTESI, SEBASTIÁN EDUARDO; HEREDIA, DANIEL ESTEBANICHAUD, M.C., MESURADO, B. Y KOHAN CORTADA, A.

Toronto

Congreso; Biennial Meeting of Society for Research in Child Development, Toronto, Canadá, marzo, 2011.; 2011

Analysis of dimensions of prosocial behavior in Argentine’s children and youngers The existing measures of prosocial behaviors are divided in global and situation-specific measures. There is evidence that there are different types of prosocial behaviors that have different personal and situational correlates.  Carlo and Randall (2002) proposed five kinds of prosocial behaviors: -       Altruistic: voluntary helping motivated primarily by concern for the need and welfare of others, -       Compliant: helping others in response to a verbal or nonverbal request. -       Emotional: helping others under emotionally evocative circumstances. -       Public: conducted, at least in part, by a desire to gain the approval and respect of others and enhance one’s self-worth. -       Anonymous:  performed without knowledge of whom is helped. -       Dire: helping in crisis or emergency circunstances. In a recent study Richaud et al. (2010) found that the Altruistic kind is intrinsically motivated and associated with parental acceptance related to secure attachment. 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 no significant relationship was found related to Compliance, and Dire and Emotional had to be analyzed combined in only one variable. From a psychometric point of view, in the factor analysis carried out by Carlo and Randall (2002), the factors corresponding to Compliant and Dire 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 Argentine’s children from 10 to 16 years, of both sexes, to determine how many factors or dimensions could explain the prosocial behavior of children and youngers of Argentine.   Children completed the Prosocial Tendencies Measure (PTM) (Carlo & Randall, 2002) that measures the six different types of prosocial behaviors stated before, and it  was translated and back-translated for the Argentinian 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 model fits better to the data (Table 2).  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 (Richaud et al.,2010). 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.