(depending on the teen's grade level), these nominators comprised approximately 38% of the entire student population in these grades. Although this differs from the coverage achieved in classroom rating procedures, the large number of raters for each teen (in essence, each teen received a yes/no nomination from each nominator in his/her grade) means that this subsample of nominators is likely to yield fairly reliable estimates of social acceptance for each teen. Preliminary analyses of the stability of social acceptance ratings over time (indicating a 1-year stability coefficient of r =.75, p<.0001) further suggest that this procedure was indeed reliably capturing the social acceptance of the teens in our study. Other data indicate that social acceptance assessed in this manner is strongly linked to other theoretically relevant indices such as attachment security and quality of close friendship (Allen, Porter, McFarland, McElhaney, & Marsh, 2007). The raw number of nominations each teen received was standardized within grade level before being added to the main data set following the procedure described by Coie et al (1982).
