Everybody Likes Them: Exploring Popularity in an American Middle School

This study uses a mixed-methods approach to understand the role that friendliness plays in the popularity of popular, friendly, liked American middle school students. Popularity is a prolific topic of study, as it is an important factor in the overall organization of the peer group, and students actively seek out being popular or being friends with popular people. Popularity is also highly context-specific, but despite this, it is not frequently studied in the field of anthropology. Furthermore, characterizations of popular students as being both prosocial and aggressive have led researchers to try to better understand why some popular students are aggressive, but not if or why some popular students are prosocial. Therefore, this study offers an anthropological, ethnographic approach to understanding popular students who are prosocial that can both add to the existing literature in anthropology, as well as serve as a reliable approach to studying popularity in different contexts. Results show that popular, friendly, liked students can be motivated by intentionally inclusive behaviors that they feel will create a more welcoming social environment for all of their peers. Secondary to the principal research question, it was also found that popularity is made up of different aspects, but all popular students do not possess all of these aspects; there is no “correct” combination to be popular.