Children fulfill various roles in a classroom. During primary school, a child learns (whether consciously or not) what it is like to be part of a group and what his or her role is within this group. During this period, social relationships with peers become increasingly important for a child. Children will make friends and want to ‘belong’. This ‘wanting to fit in’ can be very difficult for children and this can really bother a child. Assigning a social status to a particular child can be done in different ways. This is also used in education.
Social status
Social status means the role a child fulfills in a particular context. This is assigned to the child in question by other children . A child can have a high or low social status (Scholte, Engels, Haselager & de Kemp, 2004). Social status can be used in different ways. In the past, it was mainly defined as the degree of liking of a particular person. This was often referred to in a class as sociometric popularity, which will be discussed further below. Today, social status is more defined as one’s visibility, respect, and influence over others. This is called perceived popularity (Van der Horst, De Keijzer, Maat &Vrugteveen, 2016). Perceived popularity is often related to high dominance and leadership, as these children exert a lot of influence over other children. According to Hawley (1999; 2006) (Hawley, 1999), social dominance is associated with successful access to desired resources (Van der Horst & colleagues, 2016). These resources are also called resources and a child can use these resources to exert more influence on other children. Because children with many resources can exert a lot of influence on other children, high social dominance often leads to a higher degree of aggressive and bullying behavior. Children with low social dominance and therefore few resources, in contrast to children with high social dominance, are less popular and have a greater chance of becoming victims of bullying behavior (Van der Horst & colleagues, 2016).
Resource control theory
As mentioned, according to Hawley, a person has a higher social dominance if he has many resources at his disposal and can also retain these resources. Hawley describes this in his Resource Control Theory and calls this acquisition and retention of resources resource control (Van Atten, Mons, Neunman & De Sousa Fortes, 2012). A child can use his resources to win over other children. For example, a child with many friends (one of the resources) can use these friends to make life difficult for another child. In contrast to the children with many resources, there are also children who do not have these resources or have them to a lesser extent. A person with few resources will have less power in the classroom, as this child does not have the option to share or not share their resources. A child with little power will then adapt more quickly to others and to the situation. There are a number of ways in which a child can obtain these resources: coercive (directly aggressive), prosocial (cooperative), or a combination of these. Coercive behavior means that the child uses aggression, such as bullying or threatening. While prosocial behavior refers to desired behavior, such as exchanging or simply politely asking for a certain object (Van der Horst & colleagues, 2016).
Types of strategies
Based on these two strategies (coercive and prosocial), five types of children can be distinguished: prosocial controllers, coercive controllers, bistrategists, noncontrollers and typicals (Van der Horst & colleagues, 2016).
Prosocial controllers
Prosocial controllers mainly apply prosocial strategies. Other children like them and score average to above average on perceived popularity. According to Hawley (eg 2003a; 2003b; 2007), these children score above average on resource control. While Olthof and colleagues (2011) found that they scored lower on the degree of resource control compared to studies by Hawley.
Coercive controllers
The coercive strategists use coercive strategies . These children appear to score low on sociometric popularity, but score high on resource control and perceived popularity.
Bistrategists The third type, bistrategists, use both coercive and prosocial strategies. Compared to the other types, these children are the most socially dominant, they have the most resources and score high on both perceived and sociometric popularity.
Noncontrollers The noncontrollers actually rarely use either strategy. These children have low sociometric and perceived popularity and score the lowest on resource control.
Typicals The last group, the typicals, is a residual group and scores below average to average on resource control. Is also liked below average to average by other children and scores average on perceived popularity.
Effectiveness of the strategies Research has been conducted into the effectiveness of the various strategies (Van Hoek, Doldersum, Hereijgers, Asatouri, 2016). Research by Olthof, Goossens, Vermande, Aleva and Van der Meulen (2011) shows that the bistrategists score significantly higher on resource control than the other children with other strategies. This research also showed that the coercive controllers score significantly higher than the typical controllers, the prosocial controllers and the non-controllers. What should be mentioned here is that this research was only done with preschoolers and may therefore not apply to every age category. In contrast to the research by Olthof and colleagues (2011), Hawley’s research also investigated adolescents with an average age of 14 years. This research shows that prosocial and bistrategists are liked by their peers. These results were obtained by self-report and their reliability may be questioned, as these children may have given socially desirable answers. So there have been a number of studies on these types of strategies, yet it is curious that different studies have produced different results. This makes it important to conduct a comprehensive longitudinal study of these strategies to gain more knowledge about them.
Types of resources
Hawley distinguishes between three types of resources: material, social and informational. For example, material resources refer to food and clothing, while social resources refer to friendship. Informational resources make it easier to obtain material or social resources. The value of each resource depends on how much someone depends on it (Van Hoek & colleagues, 2016).
So if children can obtain and maintain these resources, they have the opportunity to exercise power over other children by sharing or not sharing these resources with other children.
Sociometric and perceived popularity
As mentioned above, popularity is divided into two types; sociometric and perceived popularity. Similarities between these two types are that both types of popular children are physically attractive, have many friends and exhibit prosocial behavior. Differences between these two types are that sociometrically popular children are also cooperative and reliable. The commitment of sociometrically popular children to school is also relatively high. In contrast to the sociometrically popular group, perceived popular children more often show aggressive characteristics, are more visible, self-righteous, arrogant and influential (Van Hoek & colleagues, 2016).
Measuring perceived popularity
The different types of popularity also require different methods to measure this popularity. With perceived popularity, the children in the class are asked which children they consider popular and which children they consider unpopular. So here we do not look at whether the child likes these children or not, but it is purely about reputation.
Measuring sociometric popularity
Sociometric popularity is measured by determining the degree of liking. This is measured by asking children how nice or unnice they find the children in the class. In this way, a classification can be made of the different types of children: popular (popular), rejected (not loved), controversial (both loved and not loved) or ignored (little mentioned).