[MUSIC] So we talked before about the ways that we have been studying peer popularity for many, many years in the literature and psychologist have been looking at this across hundreds of studies for decades now, really starting in 1980s. But at some point, probably in the late 90s or so. Researchers named Parkhurst and Andrea Hotmyer were talking about their findings to adolescents. And this was interesting, because most of the research that had been done on popularity prior to this time was really done with kids that were much earlier. At 5, 6, 7, maybe all the way up to 11 years old. But they were working with older adolescents, and they were talking with the adolescents about how popularity is measured. And they explained liked most and liked least, and the adolescents were very confused. And they said to the researchers why are you asking how much people are liked the most or liked the least? That has nothing to do with popularity, this was a surprise. I mean, this has been the basis of hundreds of studies. So the researchers asked them a little bit more. And they said, yeah, the adolescents told them, we don't necessarily like the kids that are popular. They're just really popular. But the researchers did, and what many other psychologists have learned is that there are different ways of thinking about popularity and some of them have been studied before, especially in the world of human ethology. Really people that are interested in understanding how groups go together including even ethology studies that are not with human species. What they find is that there's a way of understanding group dynamics that has a lot more to do with dominance. It has a lot to do with who gets access to resources. So if its a bunch of chimps that's eats, who gets the first banana and who gets the first mating partner when there is some resource that is made available to the whole group. And people have looked to that. And what Parkhurst and Hotmyer found was that there may be a way of understanding popularity that happens in adolescence that's much closer to that way that people have really studied these other species. So what they did was, they asked kids not who do you like the most and who do you like the least. But they ask kids, who's the most popular, and who's the least popular? And then something that you can do is you can take a different score. Least popular subtracted from most popular. And call that social reputation. So rather than social preference which was like most minus like least and it reflected our preferences for one another. Social reputation is most popular minus least popular, and it captures our reputations of popularity among one another. So the idea is that that's a little bit different than the way we think about likeability. And research has then been done to try and understand how similar likeability is to this new measure of popularity that's really only been studied for a little while now. Well, let me tell you a little bit about that. But I want to show you the results of this study that are going to offer some correlation coefficients. So just in case it's been a while since you've taken statistics, and you didn't remember, or you never learned what correlation coefficients are. Here's a graphic that will help you out a little bit. So a correlation is really saying that as values of one variable go up, values of another variable also go up that would be a positive correlation. So in other words, if I said the number of people that are sitting in a room, how is that related to the number of chairs that are occupied in that room? Well, that would probably be almost a perfect correlation. For every person in the room, there is one more chair that is occupied. A perfect correlation in which both variables go up together would be a positive correlation of 1.0. But of course usually things don't correlate in that way. So we might say that the taller you are, the better you are at getting free throws in a basketball game. Not exactly, but they're probably correlated somewhat. What you can see in this graphic is that, that correlation is based on how much that relationship is imperfect. So a correlation of 0.90 is almost a perfect relationship. A correlation of 0.65 is that they tend to generally go together but there's lots of reasons why an increase in one variable doesn't always mean an increase in the other variable. And then you might see a correlation really low, like 0.10 which says these two variables really have almost nothing to do with each other at all. This is exactly the way you would interpret a negative correlation. That simply means that as one variable goes up, the other variable goes down. So in other words the more people there are in a room, the less unoccupied chairs. So with that brief tutorial in correlations, let's talk a little bit about research that's tried to look at who are the kids that are the most popular and is that at all correlated with who are the kids are the most well liked. One great study that was done by looked at this question among boys, among girls, and they tried to look at whether there was something that happened in adolescence that made popularity different than likeability. And here's what they found. For boys, they found that there was a pretty strong correlation between who is well liked, and who is really popular. When kids were just before pubertal development, just before they started becoming adolescents. Correlation of 0.77 is really high in psychological research. Saying that these are almost pretty much the same thing, but as you can see, as boys got older and older, those two variables, likeability and popularity, start to become two different things. There's been lots of research on this since this article, and what's been found is that, if you look younger than age 11, popularity and likeability are kind of the same thing, so who's popular reject and neglect the controversial and average based on who's liked the most liked the least. It's kind of the same thing, as who's most popular and who's least popular you get the same answers, before age 11, but as you get older and after you turn 16, 17 and so on, they actually become very, very different things. If you think about this a little bit, back to the idea of thinking about celebrities, celebrities in some ways might be very high in the way that species have looked at dominance and access to resources and visibility. They're very, very popular. But when it comes to who's liked most and liked least, they're kind of controversial. So those two things are very, very different from one another. And in fact what we find is that the kids that grow up to be the most popular are the kids who were either popular in terms of liked the most, or they were very, very controversial. So what we see is that there are some differences between these two variables, especially as kids get older. What's also interesting is that this is different very much between boys and girls. For girls, what you also see is that as, when girls are really young, the relationship between who's most popular and who's liked most, they tend to be almost the same. In this case, a little bit less at 11 years old. 0.67 is the correlation. But you can see that as girls get older and older that correlation goes down to just about 0. Meaning that who's popular and who's really well liked, they're kind of not related at all anymore and it's certainly not a significant correlation. Meaning that these are two variables that have nothing to do with each other whatsoever. And this finding has also been replicated a lot, suggesting that for girls, the difference between who is the most popular and who's liked the most, it becomes nothing. A very big difference between those, there's no relation between those two variables at all as girls get older. And that's much more the case for girls than it is for boys. So overall, during this series of videos you've seen a little bit about how it is that we come to operationalize the construct of popularity. And the way that we do it is in two different ways. One is that we try and understand the kids that are really well liked. We call that social preference. And sometimes we can use social preference and social impact to really come up with five different categories really of likeability. We call one of them popular but it suggests those that are very well liked, rejected, neglected, controversial, or average. But there is this new measure that's just recently been studied. Which looks more at reputations of popularity, and it more tacks on to who is most visible, who is most dominant, who has access to the most resources? It seems to be something very unique among girls, and very unique especially as you get into middle and late adolescence and adulthood. So those are the two kinds of popularity that we're going to talk about for the rest of this course.
