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Cited by 293

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The Meaning of Meanness: Popularity, Competition, and Conflict among Junior High School Girls

Merten, Don E.·1997·Sociology of Education
DOI 10.2307/2673207
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Abstract

The dirty dozen was the name used by several teachers to refer to a clique of junior high school girls who were both mean and popular. In this school, the students used the term mean as a largely undifferentiated characterization for acts of commission and omission whose intent, or result, was to hurt someone emotionally. This article proposes that exploring the meaning of meanness is a starting point for understanding the connections between female competition, conflict and popularity. An examination of these connections in the context of a clique of popular girls allows for a better understanding of the sociocultural construction of meanness in junior high school

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Metadata

Authors
Merten, D. E.
Venue
Sociology of Education
Publisher
JSTOR
Published
1997-07
Volume
70
Issue
3
Pages
175
ISSN
0038-0407 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.2307/2673207
OpenAlex
W2009233223
Cited by
293
References
0
FWCI
6.91
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Meaning of Meanness: Popularity, Competition, and Conflict among Junior High School Girls. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/2673207
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Merten, D. E. (1997). The Meaning of Meanness: Popularity, Competition, and Conflict among Junior High School Girls. Sociology of Education. https://doi.org/10.2307/2673207

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.