Researchers explain high school cliques, how to prevent them

Anyone who has watched Mean Girls or Clueless knows, high school social structures are rigid and hierarchical -- sometimes cruelly so. And while those movies are exaggerations of that reality, high schools across the country really are organized in predictable ways, with established pecking orders and factions organized by race, age, class, gender and social status.

But even though these social hierarchies are a constant of high school social life, their prevalance is not unavoidable. New research out of Stanford University suggests smaller more structured schools feature student bodies that are less rigidly divided into factions.

Drawing on data from two studies, which looked at the formation of friendships at both the school level and the classroom level, sociologists at Stanford make the case that smaller schools, with a limited supply of potential friends, up the social "cost" of excluding any one individual from a group -- thus diminishing the likelihood that peer groups will form based strictly on preconceived notions about race or social status.

Larger schools on the other hand, provide the perfect conditions for accentuated social hierarchies and faction-forming. Sizable student bodies present a perfect combination of opportunity and anxiety that compel kids to form predictable groups.

"They're being exposed to a bunch of people they don't know, so they're concerned about security," Daniel A. McFarland, professor of education at Stanford Graduate School of Education, told The Washington Post. "With choice and diversity, people tend to sit with their own people in the lunchroom."

But as is explained in the new study -- published Tuesday in the American Sociological Review -- school and class size isn't everything. It's also about structure. The more a school is organized toward academics and school-related activities, and the fewer opportunities students have to mix on their own accord, the more likely students are to form groups based on shared interests -- and not class, gender, race, age or social status.

"Educators often suspect that the social world of adolescents is beyond their reach and out of their control, but that's not really so,'' McFarland said in a press release. "They have leverage, because the schools are indirectly shaping conditions in these societies."