Staying Cool Across the First Year of Middle School

As students transition into middle school they must successfully negotiate a new, larger peer context to attain or maintain high social standing. The goal of this study was to examine the extent to which the maintenance, attainment, and loss of a cool status over the course of the sixth grade is associated with student and classroom levels of physical, verbal, and relational aggression. To address this goal, we studied a sample of 1985 (55% girls) ethnically diverse adolescents from 99 sixth grade classrooms in the United States. Attaining a cool status at any point across the school year was associated with stronger aggressive reputations. Additionally, classroom norms for aggressive behavior moderated the association between changes in aggression over the school year and the stability of coolness such that students who maintained their coolness across the school year showed greater increases in their verbally aggressive reputations from fall to spring when they were in classrooms with higher levels of aggression. The findings illustrate the importance of fitting in with social norms for maintaining a high social status among a new set of peers in middle school

Person–Group Dissimilarity in Involvement in Bullying and Its Relation with Social Status

This study tested a person–group dissimilarity model for the relation between peer preference on the one hand, and bullying and victimization on the other. This model accounts for both individual and group (i.e., classroom) factors and postulates that children will be rejected by their peers when they display behaviors that deviate from the group norm. We tested the model in a sample of 2,578 early adolescents in 109 middle school classrooms. Multilevel analysis was used to account for our nested data when examining individual and group effects simultaneously in cross-level interaction terms. The results supported our hypotheses based on the dissimilarity model. Classroom norms of behavior appeared to affect the relation between involvement in bullying and peer preference, in that early adolescents who bullied were more likely to be rejected by their peers in a classroom where bullying was non-normative. In classrooms where bullying was normative, adolescents who bullied were less likely to be rejected or were even liked by their peers (i.e., positive scores on peer preference). The same was true for victimization, although victims still had low scores on peer preference even when victimization was normative. Theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed in terms of directions for future research and intervention in bullying.