Preadolescent Clique Stratification and the Hierarchy of Identity*

This article focuses on one of the most critical features of elementary 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. This ranges from the popular clique at the top, to the wannabes who hang around the popular people's periphery seeking access, to the individuals forming smaller middle‐level friendship circles, to the social isolates at the bottom. Membership at each of these ranks carries with it a distinct experience in terms of power and domination, intra‐group stratification, type of leadership, and friendship relations, leading to a further stratification by group into a hierarchy of identity. We conclude by examining the basis for preadolescents' identity formation, augmenting previous models of identity and social position that rely exclusively 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.