Introduction: Gaining and maintaining social popularity is a central concern during early adolescence. Those who feel insecure about their social standing may attempt to enhance their popularity by engaging in bullying behaviors. However, whether such strategies truly achieve their intended social rewards—or perhaps even undermine it—remains unclear. Few studies have tested this process longitudinally or examined how it may differ across classrooms with varying bullying popularity norms.
Purpose: The present study examined whether bullying mediates the longitudinal link between social status insecurity and popularity and whether bullying popularity norms moderate these associations.
Method: A total of 2,310 adolescents (51.6% boys at T1; Mage = 12.36, SD = 0.69) participated in the study across five waves over a two-year period (six-month intervals).
Results: Mediation analyses using random-intercept cross-lagged panel models showed that bullying did not significantly mediate the link between social status insecurity and popularity, regardless of whether popularity was assessed via peer nominations or self-reports. Multi-group analyses revealed that bullying popularity norms moderated within-person associations differently for the two popularity indicators. For peer-nominated popularity, associations were non-significant in low-norm classrooms, while in high-norm classrooms, social status insecurity and bullying were positively associated, but bullying did not affect peer-nominated popularity. For self-reported popularity, in low-norm classrooms, only social status insecurity negatively predicted popularity, whereas in high-norm classrooms, social status insecurity was positively and reciprocally associated with bullying and negatively predicted self-reported popularity; the indirect effect remained non-significant.
Conclusions: The findings suggest that although adolescents may bully when feeling socially insecure, such behavior does not effectively enhance their popularity, whether measured by peer nominations or self-reports. Moreover, the classroom social context, in terms of bullying popularity norms, shapes the associations among social status insecurity, bullying, and popularity, but does not render bullying an effective strategy for gaining social standing.