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Panel information
Panel 22. Social Relationships

Abstract

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The existing literature has identified various repercussions of adolescents’ insecure feelings about their peer status, known as social status insecurity (SSI), on their social-behavioral, emotional, and health-related adjustments (e.g., Li & Li, 2023; Li & Wright, 2014; Long et al., 2020). SSI consists of two dimensions, popularity status insecurity (PSI) and social preference insecurity (SPI). Hence, there is an urgency in exploring mechanisms that may alleviate or exacerbate SSI. The present study was the first to use an experimental design to examine the effect of providing feedback on adolescents’ peer status in an attempt to reduce or induce their PSI and SPI.

Participants were 465 high school students (54% boys; Mage = 16.64, SDage = .99) from a rural, low-income county in China. This study used a 2 (Gender: Boy vs. Girl) x 3 (Feedback type: Positive vs. Negative vs. No feedback) quasi-experimental mixed-design. Participants imagined receiving positive feedback (favorable to their expected status), negative feedback (unfavorable to their expected status), or were given no feedback on their peer status (i.e., control condition). PSI and SPI were measured prior to and after the manipulation. Therefore, gender and feedback type are between-subject factors, and time was included as a factor to probe the within-subject effect. Since the scores for PSI and SPI are negatively skewed, the current analysis was conducted using generalized linear models with a Gamma distribution specified for the response variable.

Results showed that only boys’ PSI significantly increased after imagining receiving negative feedback on their popularity (T1 PSI estimated margin mean [EMM] = 1.78, SE = .15; T2 PSI EMM = 2.17, SE = .18; ratio = .82, SE = .06, p = .01); girls’ PSI was not affected by the manipulation (Figure 1). While no effect of feedback type on SPI was found, a main effect of gender emerged such that SPI was significantly higher among girls than boys. How the effect of some individual characteristics (e.g., resilience, social sensitivity) may influence the effect of manipulation was also explored. Moderation analysis showed that after imagining receiving positive feedback on social preference, the low resilience group reported higher SPI than the high resilience group only at T2.

While it was hypothesized that girls in general are more interpersonally sensitive (Gore et al., 1993; Rizzo et al., 2006) and thus would be prone to the effect of feedback on their peer status, the current results indicated that after imagining that fewer peers consider them as popular as they had expected, only boys became more insecure about their popularity status compared to their baseline level before the manipulation. Boys may generally place less emphasis on their popularity status in daily social interactions, and this lower salience of popularity might have made them more reactive to the manipulation, which required them to focus on the concept of popularity for an extended period of time. Additionally, the main effect of gender in the social preference condition was consistent with previous research (Li, 2022). These findings also suggest that Chinese adolescents perceive popularity status and social preference differently.

Author information

Author	Role
Mingqi Li, DePaul University	Presenting author
Yan Li, Ph.D., DePaul University	Non-presenting author

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