Being friends with popular aggressive adolescents: It’s not for everyone

• In Event: 2-052 - A More Detailed Examination of Friendship Experiences in the Lives of Adolescents

Integrative Statement

Introduction. Popular and aggressive children are visible and influential in adolescent peer groups (LaFontana & Cillessen, 2002). They hold high status, which they maintain by making physical or emotional threats (Cillessen & Mayeux, 2004). While friends of aggressive-popular youth enjoy unique benefits, such as basking in reflective glory (Dijkstra, Cillessen, Lindenberg, & Veenstra, 2010), they must also face unpleasant interpersonal interactions. Not everyone is cut out to be friends with aggressive-popular youth. It has been suggested that those who associate with them tend to also value physical and relational aggression (Dijkstra, Berger, & Lindenberg, 2011), and avoid the company of adults (Brown, 1990). It is not clear, however, if those wishing to befriend aggressive-popular youth share similarities with them, or if they seek such affiliations because they hold characteristics which are undesirable to most others. The current study was designed to identify the characteristics of those who nominate aggressive-popular adolescents as friends and affiliates.

Method. Participants included 450 (63.1% girls) students aged 15-19 years (M=16.05, SD=.91) from a high school in Lithuania. Adolescents identified up to 8 important peers, defined as “someone you talk with, hang out with, and do things with” (Laursen, Hafen, Kerr, & Stattin, 2012). Hierarchical generalized logistic linear models (HGLLM) were conducted to first determine if aggressive-popular adolescents were more likely to receive an important peer nomination than agemates. The model enables simultaneous investigation of adolescents and those who identify them as friends. That is, the model determines the characteristics of adolescents who receive friendship nominations while simultaneously identifying the characteristics of the nominator that moderate the association between the nominee’s characteristics and their likelihood of receiving incoming nominations. All individuals were included in the analyses as both nominators and nominees. The “nominator” refers to the individual making a friend nomination. The “nominee” refers to the individual receiving a friend nomination.
Self-reports of nominators described characteristics that were used to predict the characteristics of those who nominate aggressive-popular adolescents as friends: aggression; connected to family; connected to peers; anxious; withdrawn; school burnout; susceptibility; and perceived adulthood (Achenbach & Rescorla, 2001; Lerner et al., 2005; Slamela-Aro, 2009).

Results. HGLLM models indicated that aggressive popularity was associated with the receipt of a nomination, replicating the previous finding that aggressive-popular adolescents have more friends than other peers. Aggressive-popular adolescents were more likely to be nominated by peers who were aggressive, susceptible to influence and burned-out on school, and were less likely to be nominated by peers who were connected to family, connected to peers, anxious, and high in self-perceived adulthood. Table 1 presents results.

Aggressive-popular adolescents are not universally liked. The findings suggest that those who befriend them tend to avoid adult oversight and conventional adult sanctioned behavior (Eckert, 1989). The picture to emerge is not one where the aggressive-popular adolescent takes advantage of dissimilar or disregarded agemates but rather one where he or she resembles the cool kids (Rodkin et al., 2006) or the in-crowd (Coleman, 1961) populated by youth who preserve their status through adolescent-limited unconventional behavior.

Authors

• Daniel J. Dickson, Concordia University
  Presenting Author

• Cody Hiatt, Florida Atlantic University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Brett Laursen, Florida Atlantic University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Rita Zukauskiene, Mykolas Romeris University
  Non-Presenting Author