Social Status Among Adolescents: What Friendship Networks Reveal

What Determines Status Among Adolescents?

In an analysis of 84 school networks from the AddHealth study (over 90,000 US students in grades 7–12), Ball and Newman (2013) examined which individual traits correlate with social status derived from the direction of unreciprocated friendship nominations.

Age and grade level show the strongest association: the average rank doubles from the youngest students (grade 7) to the oldest (grade 12; ANOVA: p < 0.001). A telling detail: between grades 8 and 9 there is no significant status difference (t-test: p > 0.95). The explanation: grade 8 is the highest level in most US middle schools — its students are temporarily the “oldest” at their school and enjoy a temporary status bonus that offsets the expected gap to grade 9.

Network Analysis Methods

Popularity (in-degree): individuals frequently named as a friend by others rank significantly higher — the most popular individuals are ranked almost twice as high as the least popular (p < 0.001). This supports interpreting the ranking as a status measure, since popularity has traditionally been considered a status indicator (Hallinan & Kubitschek, 1988; Dijkstra et al., 2010).

Own nominations (out-degree): claiming many others as friends correlates more weakly, though still significantly, with rank. Making many friendship nominations does not automatically confer high status.

Status and Reciprocity

Surprisingly, gender and ethnicity show no substantial influence on status rank. The rank distributions are nearly uniform across all groups (Kolmogorov-Smirnov: D < 0.08). Social status in friendship networks therefore does not reflect demographic category membership but is determined by relational mechanisms such as reciprocated interaction and recognition.

The findings are based on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (AddHealth), the largest school-network study in the US (1994–1995). Status rankings were derived using a maximum-likelihood method from the structure of directed friendship networks (Ball & Newman, 2013). The strong age correlation aligns with Coleman’s (1961) classic observation that older students generally enjoy higher status in school communities. The absence of gender and ethnicity effects is notable and suggests that network-based status measurement captures different dimensions than general societal status hierarchies. The strong correlation between in-degree and rank confirms earlier findings by Hallinan and Kubitschek (1988) and Dijkstra et al. (2010), who identified popularity as a status indicator.

Traits of High Status

Rank and network metrics (degree) are derived from the same data — the correlations could therefore be partly circular. The AddHealth data date from the 1990s; whether the findings still hold in the age of social media is an open question. The cap of ten friendship nominations may weaken the out-degree effect in particular, since highly social individuals could not list all their friendships. Moreover, it remains unclear whether the results transfer to other cultural contexts or age groups (e.g., adults in the workplace) — the study covers only US adolescents at secondary schools.

Is Popularity Everything?

The current state of research on this aspect is summarized below.

Frequently Asked Questions

What determines social status among adolescents?

In an analysis of 84 school networks from the AddHealth study (over 90,000 US students in grades 7–12), Ball and Newman (2013) examined which individual traits correlate with social status derived from the direction of unreciprocated friendship nominations.

Does popularity depend on appearance?

Popularity (in-degree): individuals frequently named as a friend by others rank significantly higher — the most popular individuals are ranked almost twice as high as the least popular (p < 0.001).

How can you detect hierarchies in a friend group?

The findings are based on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (AddHealth), the largest school-network study in the US (1994–1995).

Is high status good for health?

Age and grade level show the strongest association: the average rank doubles from the youngest students (grade 7) to the oldest (grade 12; ANOVA: p < 0.001). A telling detail: between grades 8 and 9 there is no significant status difference.