engleski

Do popular students ("stars") have good quality friendship? The connection between quality friendship and the sociometric status of pupils

Popularity and friendship are two different social experiences, linked to one another. It may be presumed that popular students have more better quality friendships because they have more possibilities to make friends, but popularity does not necessarily imply quality friendships. The starting point for this study was the Bukowski and Hoza model of peer relationships, which distinguishes two levels: popularity and friendship. The first defines a one-way structure (group orientated), the expression of the relationship of peers towards an individual student, whilst the level of friendship indicates a two-way, mutual relationship, as a reflection of the positive experience between two students. The definition of popularity in the classroom hierarchy includes popular, unpopular and moderately popular students, categorized according to the sociometric index: popular, rejected, neglected, average and controversial. The friendship dimensions are analysed on the basis of four factors of quality: intimacy, emphasizing self-worth, spending free time together, and protection. A student’s popularity was established by affective sociometry. Students expressed their level of attraction to each member of their class. A judgemental sociometry technique was used with a five-point numerical scale to measure affective popularity. 312 sixth and seventh-grade students took part in the research. It was shown that popular students received the highest scores in terms of intimacy, emphasis of self-worth, and protection, whilst spending quality free time together was not emphasized more than with unpopular, moderately popular and controversial students. Despite the high scores in the dimensions of friendship quality represented here, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and the relevant post-hoc tests, failed to establish any statistically significant difference between popular students ("stars") and other students.

popularity, sociometric status, friendship quality, classroom hierarchy

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