Resource control groepen en peer status

Abstract

The main purpose of the present study was to examine if adolescents, who are going through a school transition, can achieve a higher peer status in a more socially accepted way. According to the Resource Control Theory (Hawley, 1999) there are five types of groups that use different strategies to achieve this higher peer status: prosocial controllers, coercive controllers, bi-strategic controllers, non-controllers and typical controllers. By doing a MANOVA and an ANOVA these five groups have been compared in this study on peer status (resource control, perceived popularity, being a leader in a group and peer likeability). The research shows that the bi-strategic controllers score significantly higher on resource control, perceived popularity and being a leader in a group, than the non-controllers and the typical controllers. The prosocial controllers score significantly higher on peer likeability than the bi-strategic controllers and the coercive controllers. This implies that adolescents, who are going through a school transition, can only achieve a higher peer status in a more socially accepted way for the peer status: peer likeability. For the other types of peer status, resource control, perceived popularity and being a leader in a group, the results show that it is not possible to achieve a higher peer status in a more socially accepted way.