14 DAY TRIAL // A team of researchers from the University of California in Davis (UCD) and the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) determined in a new study that teenagers who become popular in school are not safeguarded against bullying, as popular culture would have us believe. The group says that teens in this situation may actually be at a higher risk of getting picked on as a result of their social ascent.
The new investigation was conducted on a group of 4,200 high school students in North Carolina, and covered aspects related to the social behaviors and experiences of their close friends and acquaintances. In effect, researchers created a social map for each of the targeted schools, and then checked to see the incidence of bullying among every group.
In the movies, characters can escape bullying by becoming more popular, and hanging out with the “cool kids.” In real life, this is highly unlikely to happen, researchers say. Even if a teen manages to climb the social ladder, they will remain the target of the usual bullying, while also potentially attracting new bullies. Therefore, their risk of undergoing negative experiences doubles.
The team also determined that adolescents who climb the social ladder of their respective high schools are more likely to engage in bully-like behaviors towards others. Scientists with the two universities tracked changes in the social circles the test subjects belonged to for an entire year before concluding this investigation, NPR reports.
“We created sort of a social map of the school. The climb up can be painful. As kids get closer [to the top], they become more involved in social combat,” explains UCD associate professor of sociology, Bob Faris. He says that all test subjects were asked to list their friends or colleagues who had been mean to the over the past year, as well as the names of those they themselves had picked on.
One of the most interesting conclusions was that teens at the middle of the social ladder were 25 percent more likely to get bullied if they were able to climb to the top of said ladder. Only the top 4 percent of the social elite was found to be uninvolved with any bullying-related behaviors.
“They have less incentive to be aggressive because they have nowhere else to climb. They have the luxury of being nice to everyone,” Faris explains. Details of the new research were published in the April 1 issue of the journal American Sociological Review. Official statistics indicate that as many as 33 percent of all high school students in the United States are bullied every year.
Most of the teens who are picked on are made into targets because of their weight, sexual preferences, disabilities, or any other factor that makes them unpopular in the eyes of the other students, add researchers from the US National Center for Education Statistics.