Preferred distance. Participants were asked to create their own preferred seating arrangement. Toward
this end, they received an empty map of the seating arrangement of their classroom and stickers with
the names of their classmates. They then were instructed to place their classroom peers at the seats
where they would want them to sit. Preferred distance was then computed from each participant’s
own classroom map in the same way as actual distance was. For each individual map, the number
of desks and aisles between the child who made the map and each classroom peer were counted.
Euclidian distances were then calculated to indicate the preferred distance of the target child to each
classroom peer. Data were scored as missing when a child did not place a classmate in a seat on the
map. Missing scores (4.54%) were replaced by the average distance of that classroom (Kenny, 2007).