ABSTRACT
Popularity goals include the desire to gain greater social status, whether through being more well known or being more well liked by others. Higher levels of popularity goals relate with lower levels of school engagement and lower academic achievement due to popular goal students perceiving these as barriers to popularity. Popularity can be associated with a variety of negative behaviors including dominance, aggression, and lower prosocial behavior. Still, future research should examine differences in popularity. For example, it may be that prosocial and popular students might do well academically, whereas aggressive and less academically oriented popular students struggle in school.
Social status among peers can positively impact numerous areas of development including social and emotional functioning (Ladd, 2005), as well as academic motivation and school performance (Austin & Draper, 1984; DeRosier, Kupersmidt, & Patterson, 1994). Not all forms of social status necessarily equate to positive school outcomes at every developmental stage, however. As youth enter into adolescence, certain forms of social status correlate with deviant and aggressive behaviors as well as academic disengagement (Cillessen & Marks, 2011; Rodkin, Ryan, Jamison, & Wilson, 2013). As such, social goals focused on attaining and maintaining status may begin to interfere with holding and successfully fulfilling other kinds of social and academic goals. This chapter reviews the nature of peer social status, social goals related to these forms of status, and how these status goals impact other areas of functioning.
