Popularity

Monday, August 27, 2007

One of the classes I'm taking this semester is "Popularity, Friendship, and Peer Relations." Yes, there's a whole subset of social psychology that studies the interactions among children and their peers.

Apparently there's several different categories for classifying children, according to their social preference (the degree to which they are liked by other children) and social impact (their visibility or the extent to which others know who they are).

Popular kids are high on social preference and social impact. Though they technically constitute about 15% of kids, more than 40% of kids consider themselves popular in self-reports.

Rejected kids are low on social preference and high on social impact. Everyone knows who they are, and everyone hates them. This is sad! I was probably, for most of elementary school, a rejected kid. Rarely do rejected kids move into another social category, thus suggesting that I might still be a rejected kid at heart.

Neglected kids are low on both social preference and social impact. Nobody knows them, and nobody cares enough about them to have an opinion. I'm not sure if it would be sadder to be a rejected or a neglected kid. Interestingly, in class we were supposed to identify someone we knew from school (I chose high school) for each of these social categories, and I couldn't even think of anyone to fit the neglected kid category. That pretty much says it all.

Lastly, there are the controversial kids. They are high on social impact (everyone knows them) but received mixed reviews on social preference. They're the kids you either love or hate. An example of this category... Rosie, of course. I like her... but that's for another blog.

Basically to determine which kids fall in which category, their peers and teachers are asked to identify the most liked and least liked students (there is no limit to how many kids they can put in each category). But conducting research like this can have a negative effect: "One possible negative consequence of sociometric research is the priming effect. Children who are rated by their peers as 'least liked' may subsequently face greater rejection due to negative thoughts being primed in raters' minds. By identifying a child as disliked, their peers become increasingly likely to ostracize, taunt, or tease them in future social settings. This effect is most evident immediately after the research is conducted."

That sounds really bad for rejected kids. Maybe we shouldn't be doing this type of research anymore. What else is there to "discover" that we all didn't learn in high school?