ECPN Student Poster Contestant: Holding a Peripheral Position within an Unpopular Clique: A Longitudinal Risk Factor for Early Adolescents’ Self-Esteem

Early adolescence is characterized by a drop in self-esteem. In parallel, adolescents place greater value upon popularity and affiliation to a group of friends, called a clique (Brown et al., 2009; Valente, 2010). Literature shows that being part of an unpopular peer group is related with low self-esteem (Brown et al., 1987). Also, youth belong to a social hierarchy within their clique, which can be estimated with a centrality score. We hypothesized that youth who hold a peripheral position within this hierarchy are more likely to experience decreases in self-esteem than the central members. In addition, we suppose that being a peripheral member of a clique is a risk factor that could result in greater drops in self-esteem for youth who are part of an unpopular clique than for those who are part of popular cliques.

The goal of this study is to explore the moderation effect of clique popularity on the link between centrality and adolescent self-esteem over a one-year period. We controlled for age, sex, individual popularity and self-esteem at baseline.

METHOD: 470 adolescents (54% girls, mean age 13 years) in the 1^st and 2^nd years of a secondary school in Belgium were assessed twice, one year apart. A French version of the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (1965) assessed self-esteem (10 items, α = .81). Friendships among participants were identified through reciprocal nominations to the question “Who do you like the most among your grade mates?” Cliques were identified using the algorithm Girvan-Newman of UCINET 6 (Borgatti et al., 2014). A centrality score was computed for each clique member using UCINET 6. Most-popular and least-popular peer nominations to the question “Who are the most and the least popular among your grade mates?” were combined to assess participants’ popularity. Clique popularity was computed from the average of clique members’ popularity scores. However, this calculus excluded the target participant. Centrality and clique popularity scores were dichotomized using minus one standard deviation as a threshold, in order to isolate peripheral members and unpopular cliques.

RESULTS: Moderation analysis on Mplus 7.0 showed that centrality positively predicted self-esteem over time (β = .35, p < .01) and that clique popularity negatively moderated this link (β = -.47, p < .01). Further analysis showed that only peripheral teenagers within unpopular cliques were likely to experiencing a decrease in self-esteem over one year.

CONCLUSION: These findings highlight that peripheral teenagers of an unpopular clique are at particular risks of experiencing low self-esteem over time. This indicates that prevention efforts should target this category of youth in order to cope for the negative influence of this at-risk social context on their self-esteem.