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Popularity

Popularity refers to an individual’s status position among peers and reflects the hierarchical ordering or status hierarchy in the peer group. Specifically, popularity refers to which children and adolescents are considered as popular, admirable, or cool by their peers and which children are attractive to affiliate with. As popularity is always relative to other people, it is inherently competitive; not everybody can be popular. This entry describes how popularity develops from childhood into adulthood. According to this description, popularity is not the same as being liked or having many friends, which has been labeled as peer acceptance or likeability.

Different Forms of Peer Status

The distinction between the concepts of popularity and peer acceptance originates from sociometric research on different status groups in the 1980s. In this research, the position of children and adolescents among their peers was assessed by means of peer nominations. Children were asked to list (nominate) peers whom they liked (or considered as friends) and whom they disliked in a given setting, most often in their classroom. Based on these nominations, children were categorized into five sociometric status groups: popular, controversial, rejected, neglected, and average. Generally speaking, popular children were highly liked and not disliked, whereas controversial children were both liked and disliked at the same time. Rejected children were mainly disliked, whereas neglected children were neither liked nor disliked.

Ethnographic studies on children’s peer ecology, however, revealed that children who were considered to be popular by other children in (early) adolescence (aged 10–14), that is, children who were attractive for affiliation and influential, were not necessarily the most liked in the peer group. Some of these children were also disliked, having an ambiguous position in the peer group. This description of popularity from ethnographic research aligns more with the sociometric controversial group as being both liked and disliked than with the sociometric popular group. Based on these studies, it was, therefore, questioned whether the term popularity adequately captured what children themselves considered as popular peers, namely, those who are attractive for affiliation and with whom they want to hang out. Consequently, the concept of perceived popularity was coined. Perceived popularity is typically measured by asking children within a specific setting to nominate those peers who are (most and least) popular or who are considered as cool. Alternatively, popularity is sometimes measured by asking teachers to indicate those peers who they consider as having leadership abilities, those whom everyone listens to, and with whom peers want to belong. Research then moved away from the original five sociometric groups by using the concepts of acceptance (likeability), rejection (disliked), and (perceived) popularity as most important indicators of peer status.

Developmental Differences

Developmental studies have shown that popularity and acceptance strongly overlap in childhood but start to diverge in middle childhood to (early) adolescence. Although studies on popularity in early adulthood are rare, the few studies available seem to indicate that both constructs again converge when adolescents move into adulthood. Apparently, in (early to late) adolescence (aged 10–18), popularity is distinct from acceptance but not in childhood and adulthood. In early childhood (aged 6–7), popularity is conceptually similar to being well liked and associated with prosocial behaviors and good studentship. However, once children become older and move into middle childhood (aged 9–10), popularity emerges as a distinct concept linked to specific features, such as physical appearance and aggressive behaviors. The importance of popularity is further emphasized by studies showing that in adolescence popularity, rather than acceptance, becomes one of the most important dimensions along which peer groups are organized. Peer relations in terms of who hangs out with whom and who belongs to which group are largely defined along lines of popularity in the large peer ecology of adolescents.

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