One of the most widely used methodologies to assess the status that an individual presents to their peers is sociometry, which was developed by Moreno (1934). This theory was proposed to investigate, quantify, and qualify interpersonal relationships and social dynamics within the group (Zequinão et al., 2020). For this reason, sociometry is considered one of the most used methods to determine the integration of students in the classroom when evaluating the acceptance and rejection relationships between classmates based on a pre-established criterion (Bacete and Cillessen, 2017; Manring et al., 2018). That is, this methodology allows establishing an organization within the peer group based on the degree of liking and disliking of an adolescent within the peer group (Janošević and Petrović, 2019; Kulawiak and Wilbert, 2020; León-Moreno et al., 2021).

Studies using sociometric methods have identified several different types of profiles obtained from the combination of acceptance and rejection scores (Coie and Cillessen, 1993; Stotsky and Bowker, 2018): (1) Popular status reflects the degree to which the young adolescent is perceived by peers to be popular; (2) Preferred status reflects the degree to which the young adolescent is highly liked (and not disliked) and accepted by peers (Engels et al., 2017; Stotsky and Bowker, 2018). Even though these two profiles correlate with each other, during adolescence, they should be considered as two different concepts (Rubin et al., 2006). This is because, when social status is measured in the adolescent population, popularity refers to social dominance, power and visibility among their peers; and social preference (also known as “acceptance”) is considered an indicator of sympathy (Shin, 2017). However, both concepts are not always considered independently; (3) Rejected status, in contrast, classifies young people who are not like by most of their peers (Farmer et al., 2011); (4) Controversial status includes students who receive high levels of acceptance and rejection, that is, they generate liking for some, and disliking for others; (5) Ignored status identifies students who receive low nomination rates, both liked and disliked, by their peers; (6) Finally, average status is found in those young people who do not receive high scores either on the positive characteristics characteristic of preferred adolescents or on the negative characteristics that characterize rejected adolescents; that is, they do not seem to stand out, although they are more visible than ignored students (Rubin et al., 2009).

In this sense, sociometric status offers the opportunity to categorize social status as positive, for the popular and preferred profile, and negative, for the rejected and ignored profile (Cerezo, 2014; Mikhailova et al., 2018). In this way, status can also be considered an indicator of the reputation adolescents achieve within the peer group (Emler and Hopkins, 1990). According to the Reputation Enhancement Theory of Emler and Reicher (1995), at this stage of development, establishing, maintaining, and improving reputation is essential. Thus, for this purpose, adolescents choose a particular self-image with which to make this reputation public through visible actions in the peer group, which, in turn, becomes a key factor for the regulation of social behavior (Bartolomé and Díaz, 2020). Diverse research have shown that, for some adolescents, positive reputation and status is achieved through involvement in transgressive and violent behaviors in the classroom (Emler, 1990; Carroll, 1995; Emler and Reicher, 1995, 2005; Carroll et al., 1996, 1997, 1999; Cava and Musitu, 2002; Kerpelman and Smith-Adcock, 2005; Estévez et al., 2012; Sánchez et al., 2012). Among these behaviors, bullying is noted as a group problem in the literature (Sekol and Farrington, 2013; Garandeau and Lansu, 2019; Harrison et al., 2021) that is receiving increasing attention over the last decade in terms of prevalence and consequences (Williams et al., 2018). This behavior has been described as a form of violence between peers that is characterized by the repetition of harmful behavior over time, by the intention of hurting or causing suffering to another, and by the imbalance of power between those involved (Rocha et al., 2013; Graham, 2016; Menéndez and Fernández-Río, 2018).

Therefore, non-normative behavior can be used by adolescents as a coercive strategy to establish and maintain higher positions in the social hierarchy, such as a dominant position (Malamut et al., 2020; Wright and Wachs, 2021) or leader in the group (Pronk et al., 2013; Herrera et al., 2019). Some studies on bullying in adolescents have shown that a significant percentage of bullies are considered popular by their peers (Guy et al., 2019; Hartl et al., 2020). Likewise, other studies indicate that popular adolescents may be particularly susceptible to engaging in bullying, as they believe they have sufficient support from their peers to implement this type of behavior (Duffy et al., 2017). Although the study of social position in the group process of bullying is a topic that arouses interest in the scientific literature, the findings available so far continue to be controversial, especially about the role of bully.

On the one hand, the results' controversy lies in the differences observed in terms of popularity and social preference in adolescence. Several studies reveal that popular adolescents who bully their peers sometimes obtain a lower social preference in the group compared to those not involved in bullying behavior (Vaillancourt et al., 2003; Caravita et al., 2009). In other words, although the bullies may be considered popular, this does not imply that they are necessarily accepted. In this sense, it is not surprising that diverse authors conclude that a significant percentage of bullying perpetrators have a controversial status within the peer group (Sentse et al., 2007, 2013). According to the literature, this status can be understood by the fact that bullies may arouse rejection in those who are the target of their bullying behaviors, but they may be admired by those who do not suffer this behavior. For some studies, the duality of status achieved by the perpetrators is not casual, as, in most cases, those involved in the bully role know from whom they can receive support, and from whom they cannot, who are the ones who become victims (Reijntjes et al., 2018). Therefore, bullies do not seek global acceptance from the classroom, but only from their reference group (Goossens et al., 2006), which reinforces the repetition of bullying (Huitsing and Veenstra, 2012; Reijntjes et al., 2018).

Although the study of sociometry in bullying provides important information about the relationship between bullying behavior and social interactions within the classroom, the studies available so far do not provide a clear picture of the bully's social position. As mentioned, general behavioral trends may not be appropriate to explain the differences in status between members of the peer group, as it may be the combination of bullying behaviors along with other factors that differentiate adolescents with a positive status from the rest of their classmates. Likewise, the fact that adolescents increasingly value reaching a position of liking in the group and consider bullying as an effective means to achieve it shows the need to deepen and understand the profile of those involved in this behavior to develop interventions aimed at preventing or reducing bullying. Therefore, the objective of this study was to carry out a systematic review of studies focused on analyzing the sociometric status and/or social position of the adolescent aggressors of some type of bullying.

A systematic search of materials published in the last 20 years (from 2001 to the present) was performed by consulting the following electronic databases: PsychInfo, Scopus, PubMed, and Web of Science. The search strategy was developed for each database using the combination of the terms such as bully^*, perpetrat^*, sociometric, peer status, popular^*, reject^*, prefer^*, neglect^*, controversial, and school. The search terms were used in combination with each other to narrow the search results.

Initially, duplicates were removed from the total number of identified records. Abstracts from the remaining references were screened to retrieve full-text manuscripts. Finally, studies fulfilling the inclusion criteria were selected for assessment.

The search was limited according to the following inclusion criteria:

The exclusion criteria contemplated in the search were:

After compiling the manuscripts, we classified the studies, identifying those that met the inclusion criteria. For each of the studies, we extracted the following information: author and year of publication, study methodology, sample information, instruments for collecting data, key findings, and conclusions. These data were extracted by a researcher and verified by a second researcher to ensure the quality and accuracy of the information. Doubts or disagreements between evaluators were resolved through discussion and consensus with the help of a third reviewer. The results of this selection process are reported below.

A modified version of the Quantitative Research Assessment Tool, developed by the Child Care and Early Education Research Connections (CCEERC, 2013), was used to assess the methodological strength of the studies included in this review. This tool, which includes 12 items, was designed to provide general guidelines evaluating the quality of research studies. For this review, we selected five items from the tool (items 2, 3, 6, 9, and 10): “Randomized Selection of Participants,” “Sample Size,” “Operationalization of Concepts,” “Appropriateness of Statistical Techniques,” and “Omitted Variable Bias” (see Table 1). Item 1 (“Population”) was discarded because it was not considered relevant for the review, as all studies focused on a specific subset of the population (adolescents) and, as most of the studies were cross-sectional, we also excluded Item 4 (“Attrition Rate and Follow-up Studies”). Given that we considered the operationalization of the variables of each of the studies to analyze the methodological quality, we also discarded Item 5 (“Main Variables or Concepts”) to avoid redundant information. Finally, Item 7 (“Numeric Tables”), Item 8 (“Missing Data”), Item 11 (“Analysis of Main Effect Variables”), and Item 12 (“Research Ethical”) were deleted because they did not provide important information for the object of the present review.

In addition, two author-elaborated items were added: “Types of sociometric status profiles measured” and “Descriptive analysis and reliability of the instrument,” whose purpose was to evaluate whether the selected studies considered the frequency with which the two harassment dynamics occurred and whether it carried out a descriptive and reliability analysis of each of the instruments administered. Finally, we established 7 criteria in the final version, which allowed us to verify the homogeneity of the studies, especially that of the instruments used, which was essential for the comparison of the results. Each item could be rated as −1, 0, 1, or NA, and thus the total score could range from −7 to 7. According to the specifications of the tool, studies with lower scores should be regarded with more caution compared with studies with higher scores. Six of the studies reviewed had a score of 5 or higher.

As shown in Table 1, some studies used interviews or qualitative measures and did not present reliability indices of the instruments used for data collection. Other studies did not measure each of the five sociometric types. These methodological aspects could explain, in part, the observed disparity regarding the social status of the bullies.

Among the studies that suggest that there is a relationship between perpetrating bullying in adolescence and having a high position in the social hierarchy, Pouwels et al. (2018a,b) observed that adolescents who bully were most popular and had the most socially dominant position in the peer group. In the same way, the study of Zequinão et al. (2020) found that bullies achieved a more positive status than those who were not involved in bullying. More specifically, the results found by Guy et al. (2019) revealed that, compared to the rest of the bullying roles, bullies had higher levels of popularity and social preference. Similarly, Farmer et al. (2010) found higher levels of social prominence, defined by the authors as the degree to which classmates perceive a student as being cool or popular, in those adolescents considered bully. These results are in line with studies that concluded that popular adolescents were involved in more intimidation behaviors than average adolescents (Closson, 2009; Pouwels et al., 2018a), and were more likely to maintain this status during the transition to high school than bullies who were not popular within the group (Shi and Xie, 2012).

The findings of Chen et al. (2020) revealed that adolescents who were bullies had high levels of acceptance and low levels of rejection within the group as long as they alternated the role of aggressor with that of “defender” (a role characterized by supporting the victims and trying to stop bullying). Other studies have observed that bullying toward highly liked peers was associated with popularity for those adolescents who had high preference scores, suggesting that behavior is related to social benefits when it occurs among those at the top tier of the social preference hierarchy (Peets and Hodges, 2014). Similarly, Dijkstra et al. (2008) concluded that popularity moderated the impact of bullying on the social status of bullies, as bullying by popular adolescents, on the one hand, weakened the negative impact that this behavior has on acceptance and, on the other, the positive impact on rejection.

Although few studies have considered that bullies maintain a negative social position within the peer group, it is interesting to take their findings into account. In this sense, Greco (2019) observed that bully preadolescents achieved a negative status within the group derived from a higher percentage of rejection nominations. Besides, Palacios and Berger (2016) found that the negative associations of bullying with popularity and social preference were not affected by the normative peer context. Cillessen et al. (2014) detected negative relationships between popularity and bullying. They also indicated that the bully role was more strongly associated with negative status in those adolescents who were more likely to make hostile attributions. For these authors, hostile attributions refer to attributing harmful or adverse intentions to others' ambiguous behaviors, and they suggest that negative status and biased attributional factors can predict subsequent bullying.

Most of the studies in this review have reported disparities between the social position of the perpetrators of bullying, finding groups of bullies with a positive social position and other groups with a negative status. Some of them indicated that bullying behaviors at school were associated with greater popularity and a decrease in social preference and likebility (Caravita et al., 2010; Pronk et al., 2017; Malamut et al., 2020), others, in turn, showed differences based on gender and type of bullying. That is, high levels of overt bullying were associated with lower popularity for girls, but higher for boys. In contrast, high levels of relational bullying were only significantly related to popularity in the case of girls (Waasdorp et al., 2013). Along these lines, Peeters et al. (2010) found that positive social status, specifically popularity, was related to social intelligence (the ability to understand the perspective of others and be able to manipulate their thoughts) and with the use of relational bullying, concluding that popularity and social intelligence may be preconditions for using this type of harassment.

The findings of Veenstra et al. (2010) revealed that the bullies, regardless of whether they were girls or boys, were rejected by the gender toward whom the bullying was directed but not by the gender toward whom it was not directed. However, male bullying toward the same gender was positively related to female acceptance. In other words, boys who attacked other boys obtained high levels of liking from the girls, an effect that was not observed in the case of female bullying. Continuing with the differences by gender, Lee (2009) observed that bully boys were likely to be rejected by peers, whereas bully girls were both rejected and accepted by peers. Concerning the type of bullying, verbal bullying was positively related to rejection in boys, but negatively in girls. However, relational bullying was not related to rejection in boys, but it clearly predicted peer rejection in girls. Likewise, the findings of Sentse et al. (2015) showed that, for boys, rejection status acted as a predictor of bullying and, in the case of girls, of popular status.

In line with the results that found positive and negative status simultaneously in the bullies, Berger et al. (2015) and Caravita et al. (2009) observed that bullying was negatively related to acceptance and social preference, and positively to perceived popularity. In the study by Closson and Hymel (2016), both direct and indirect bullying were positively associated with popularity but negatively with acceptance of the bullies. De Bruyn et al. (2010) reported that more bullies were nominated with high popularity status but low acceptance status than adolescents who were popular and accepted. Likewise, the results showed that popular status positively predicted bullying. In contrast, acceptance or preference status negatively predicted bullying and acted as a moderator of the link between popularity and bullying. That is, the correlation between popularity and bullying was stronger in adolescents with low levels of acceptance among peers. Similarly, the results of Dijkstra et al. (2008) revealed that bullying was negatively related to acceptance, and positively to peer rejection but these relationships were weakened when the bully had a popular status within the group.

Sentse et al. (2007) concluded that the norms of behavior in the classroom had an impact on the relationship between participation in bullying and the preference of peers. That is, in classrooms where bullying was not normative, adolescents who bullied were more likely to be rejected by their peers. In contrast, when bullying was normative, bullies were not only less likely to be rejected by their peers but were also more likely to achieve positive status (higher preference) in the group. The study by Van den Berg et al. (2015) showed, on the one hand, that direct bullying was higher in those adolescents with low social preference compared to the average or to highly preferred adolescents, and on the other hand, that relational bullying was higher in popular adolescents than in average or unpopular adolescents.

Regarding the studies that have associated the bully role with the positive status (Closson, 2009; Farmer et al., 2010; Shi and Xie, 2012; Waasdorp et al., 2013; Peets and Hodges, 2014; Guy et al., 2019; Chen et al., 2020; Zequinão et al., 2020), previous literature indicates that bullying behavior by popular adolescents sets the norm within the classroom, and therefore determines peer acceptance or rejection of bullying behavior (Sentse et al., 2007; Dijkstra et al., 2008; Laninga-Wijnen et al., 2020). Thus, in a classroom where bullying is normative, it can be especially easy for a popular adolescent to bully others without fear of losing their position of dominance and leadership within the group (Peeters et al., 2010). Likewise, bullies can improve their status in the group and be accepted by their peers, either out of fear of retaliation for not supporting the perpetrators of bullying, or because they also engage in this behavior in the same role (Lee, 2009). This seems to be consistent with an evolutionary theoretical perspective that considers that bullying can be viewed as an adaptive goal-directed behavioral strategy to obtain resource and reputational control. In this sense, Pronk et al. (2017) observed that adolescents' bullying role behavior and their peergroup status are similar across cultures, consistent with the evolutionary theoretical perspective of bullying as an adaptive behavior.

Other studies indicate that the positive status of bullies may be the result of considering bullying behavior as a sign of social dominance (Duffy et al., 2017) or as a way to maintain or increase the status in group (Pouwels et al., 2018a,b). Sometimes this positive status can even be encouraged when the bullying behavior is directed exclusively toward classmates who are among the highest positions of the group's hierarchy because it may be interpreted as a search for social power (Peets and Hodges, 2014). In addition, various authors identify the Reputation Enhancement Theory (Emler and Reicher, 1995), that is, the need to be seen as strong, tough, and powerful individuals, as well as to improve their position in the social hierarchy, as one of the main motives that lead bullies to intimidate others (Pronk and Zimmer-Gembeck, 2010; Houghton et al., 2012). Therefore, the positive status achieved by the perpetrators of bullying could be the result of having managed to manifest in the peer group the desired social image, that is, an image characterized by power and social dominance (Estévez et al., 2012).

Positive status, especially referring to acceptance or preference, has also been associated with bullying behavior when the role of bully coexists with the “defender” role, that is, when bulklying is combined with supportive behaviors toward the victim and with efforts to stop bullying. Thus, those adolescents who, despite being involved in bullying behavior as an bully, also defend the victims, are more likely to achieve higher levels of social preference and less likely to be rejected than the rest of the members of the peer group (Coie et al., 1991; Salmivalli et al., 1996; Warden and Mackinnon, 2003). Therefore, the role of defender seems to have a “protective” effect on the status of bullies (Chen et al., 2020), which could help explain why some bullies achieve a positive status and at the same time, a negative status, by awakening feelings of rejection, especially in those peers who intimidate and maintain negative relationships (Veenstra et al., 2007; Berger and Caravita, 2016; Closson and Hymel, 2016; Reijntjes et al., 2018).

This bipolarity in the status of bullies has been the result observed by most of the studies included in this review, and, according to the previous literature, reflects the superposition of the bullies' different ways of acting to balance the costs and benefits of bullying behavior (Hawley, 1999, 2003; Chen et al., 2020). Various studies have related the controversy over the status of bullying perpetrators to the Resource Control Theory (Hawley, 1999), which states that adolescents tend to use two different strategies, coercive and prosocial, to obtain the necessary resources they need to improve their adaptation in the peer group (Volk et al., 2012; Hartl et al., 2020), or to promote the acceptance, in this case.

On another hand, it has been observed that the acceptance/rejection of peers toward an individual can moderate the association between popularity and the bully role. Thus, adolescents who have a popular status, but also one of rejection, are considered by the peer group as perpetrators of bullying more frequently than youngsters with popular and accepted statuses. The literature indicates that this effect may be a consequence of the type of harassment used. That is, popular bullies who are not liked (rejected) tend to use more direct harassment such as physical assault or damage to property, whereas those who are liked (accepted) harass in a subtler way than direct bullying, such as relational bullying (De Bruyn et al., 2010). However, several studies included in this review have observed that the status attained by bullies within the peer group derives from a purely negative status. According to previous literature, it is not surprising for bullying behavior to be considered unpleasant and to generate rejection in some adolescents, especially in those who do not perpetrate it, causing the role of bully to occupy a low position in the social hierarchy (Berger et al., 2015). In relation to this, bullying seems to be a behavior negatively sanctioned independent of the value the group ascribed to bullying. That is, bullying seems to be unpopular and socially disliked by peers per se as an individual behavior, probably due to its abusive and immoral character (Palacios and Berger, 2016). Another argument that attempts to explain the negative status of bullies is supported by the fact that bullying can be considered a reactive resource to the rejection that bullies perceive from their peers (Cillessen et al., 2014). That is, the literature suggests that adolescents who have a negative status, in which rejection or low acceptance predominates, can rely on bullying as a resource to attract attention and achieve recognition and consideration from their schoolmates (Longobardi et al., 2018).

Despite the heterogeneity of the research included in this review, the findings of the present study show the difficulty, not only of accurately understanding the social status of bullies but also of defining the behavioral profile of adolescents whose status is not clearly located at one pole (positive or negative). Thus, it seems to support the conclusions of previous studies stating that social status not only depends on the behavioral characteristics noticed by the peers in the group but also on non-behavioral characteristics (e.g., perceived as attractive, funny, etc.) (Sentse et al., 2015; Rytioja et al., 2019).