PREADOLESCENT CLIQUE STRATIFICATION AND THE HIERARCHY OF IDENTITY

This article focuses on one of the most critical features of elementar y school students' social lives: their peer friendship groups. Within each grade, and separated by gender, a hierarchy of friendship groups is stratified according to the dimension of status and popularity. Thi s ranges from the popular clique at the top, to the wannabes who hang around the popular people's periphery seeking access, to the individua ls forming smaller middle-level friendship circles, to the social isol ates at the bottom. Membership at each of these ranks carries with it a distinct experience in terms of power and domination, intra-group st ratification, type of leadership, and friendship relations, leading to a further stratification by group into a hierarchy of identity. We co nclude by examining the basis for preadolescents' identity formation, augmenting previous models of identity and social position that rely e xclusively on status with the addition of interactional and relational factors. This structural-relational model bridges the structural and processual symbolic interactionist models of identity, linking them at a Simmelian level of analysis.