The Usual Suspects? A Comparative Investigation of Crowds and Social-type Labelling among Young British Teenagers

In the USA, reputation-based crowds (as opposed to interaction-based cliques) are a widespread, and widely reported, dimension of adolescent peer relations. To date, there is no such British literature. As part of a larger study, some 460 British secondary school pupils were asked to identify major groupings at school. Crowds accounted for almost half of all the groupings reported. While there was evidence of the usual panoply of these social type labels reported in the USA, such as Populars, Brains, and Toughies, there were also clear differences, not only between British and US crowds (e.g. a noticeable absence of Jocks and Outcasts in the British case) but also between schools, with some very distinctive, highly localized social identification units. With some evidence of ethnically oriented affiliations, these seemed to be more at the level of cliques than crowds and were very much less prevalent than anticipated by existing literature.