Exploring the peer status prototypes: A large‐scale latent profile analysis on high‐school students from four European countries

Abstract

Peer status – the regard other group members have of an individual – is fundamental for youth development. Different research traditions developed independent theoretical frameworks conceiving the dimensions underlying social status, and this led to identifying a variety of peer status prototypes. In this work, we explored whether a classification based on the four dimensions of popularity, aggression, dislike, and victimization could integrate the scattered peer status profiles found in the different traditions. A latent profile analysis on 16,224 European students identified the peer status prototypes of popular, bullies, disliked, victims, and average students. Both the peer‐ and self‐reported correlates supported that the five profiles accounted for the large variety of the students' profiles in the literature. These findings suggest that the adoption of a multidimensional approach supported by advanced statistical procedures could identify students' peer status profiles more effectively, replacing classifications based on cutoffs, and leading to a unified students' classification.

Bullying in School Among Children and Adolescents from Cognitive and Developmental Perspectives: Implications for Prevention Practices

“…There are different prototypical behavioural traits between victim and bully groups. For example, it is found that bullies are often characterised as prestigious, dominant, aggressive, and masculine, whereas victims exhibit both anxiety and aggressive traits (Marinucci et al, 2023;Moura et al, 2011).…”