Bidirectional Associations between Popularity, Popularity Goal, and Aggression, Alcohol Use and Prosocial Behaviors in A
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EMPIRICAL RESEARCH
Bidirectional Associations between Popularity, Popularity Goal, and Aggression, Alcohol Use and Prosocial Behaviors in Adolescence: A 3-Year Prospective Longitudinal Study Sarah T. Malamut
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Yvonne H. M. van den Berg2 Tessa A. M. Lansu2 Antonius H. N. Cillessen2 ●
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Received: 22 May 2020 / Accepted: 18 August 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Adolescents’ popularity and popularity goal have been shown to be related to their aggression and alcohol use. As intervention efforts increasingly aim to focus on prosocial alternatives for youth to gain status, it is essential to have a comprehensive understanding of how popularity and popularity goal are associated with aggression and substance use as well as prosocial behaviors over time. The current study examined the bidirectional associations of aggression (overt and relational aggression), alcohol use, and prosocial behavior with popularity and popularity goal in adolescence across 3 years using cross-lagged panel analyses. Participants were 839 Dutch adolescents (Mage = 13.36, SD = 0.98; 51.3% girls). The results indicated that popularity was consistently positively associated with popularity goal, but popularity goal did not significantly predict subsequent popularity. Popularity positively predicted elevated aggression and alcohol use, but lower levels of prosocial behavior. For the full sample, alcohol use and overt aggression in grade 7 both predicted subsequent popularity in grade 8. However, when considering gender differences, overt aggression no longer was a significant predictor of popularity. These results were discussed in terms of the dynamic interplay between popularity, popularity goal, and behaviors, and in terms of implications for prevention and intervention efforts. Keywords
Popularity Popularity goal Aggression Alcohol use Prosocial behavior Adolescence ●
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Introduction A key developmental change in early adolescence is the growing attention for peer relationships (e.g., Brown and Larson 2009). When youth become more interested in their interactions with peers, they also begin to strive more intensely for popularity in the peer group, with popularity goal typically peaking in early adolescence (e.g., Dawes and Xie 2017; LaFontana and Cillessen 2010). There is growing evidence that youth’s actual level of popularity and their motivations to be (more) popular are independently predictive of youth’s behaviors. Being popular as well as popularity goal are both concurrently associated with risky behaviors, such as aggression
* Sarah T. Malamut sarah.malamut@utu.fi 1
INVEST Research Flagship, Department of Psychology, University of Turku, Turku, Finland
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Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
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and alcohol use, but also with prosocial behaviors (e.g., Cillessen et al. 2014; Dumas et al. 2017). Whereas several studies have demonstrated the interplay between popularity goals and actual popularity status in predicting behavior concurrently (e.g.,
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