Afiliação e dominância em grupos de crianças pré-escolares.

This article aims to present some ethological perspectives on early peer relationships. Firstly we discuss the research work of the 1970s about the dominance hierarchies in preschool-age children. Then we discussed the concept of affiliation and in particular the studies on how to identify affiliative structures in groups of children in preschool. Given the difficulties presented by the interpretation of behavioral sociograms an alternative method is presented to identify subgroups of children with affiliation profiles: the evolution of this methodology is described. Finally, we discuss the possible links between the concepts of dominance and affiliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]