Identifying Novel Popularity Motivations and Their Associations with Popularity, Bullying, andProsocial Behavior

As goals pertaining to one’s power position in the peer group are predictors of bullying perpetration, improving our understanding of youth’s popularity motivations is crucial. This preregistered study examines motivations geared toward desirable popularity outcomes (promotion-focused) and avoiding undesirable popularity outcomes (prevention-focused). Within both, novel popularity motivation subconstructs are introduced which capture youth’s priority, change and absolute level motivations, as well as traditionally measured general popularity motivations. In addition to these popularity engagement motivations, popularity disengagement in the form of popularity disinterest is also measured. It is examined how these subconstructs are related to youth’s own popularity, bullying and prosocial behaviors among 202 students from Dutch 4th-6th grade classrooms using self- and peerreports in a school-based survey. Results showed that general and absolute level promotion-focused popularity motivations, general, priority, change and absolute level prevention-focused popularity motivations, and popularity disinterest are all distinct concepts which could be measured reliably. Moreover, higher levels of popularity were associated with stronger popularity promotion motivations, stronger priority, change and absolute level prevention motivations, and weaker popularity disinterest. Stronger bullying involvement was associated with stronger general and absolute level prevention motivation, with stronger assisting of bullies additionally being associated with stronger general and absolute level promotion motivation, and weaker popularity disinterest. Higher levels of prosocial behavior were associated with stronger absolute level prevention motivation. These results confirm the existence of multiple new popularity motivation subconstructs and illustrate especially the relevance of lowest tolerable absolute level of popularity (prevention absolute level) for both bullying and prosocial behavior.