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Resumo

Informal status hierarchy is a ubiquitous feature of social life, and it is one that drives dynamics of dominance, influence, exclusion, and stratification. Utilizing data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, this article shows that friendship nominations among adolescents are sensitive to status distinctions and that this sensitivity can be exploited to infer status relations and the level of ambiguity those relations entail. A measure is developed to uncover latent status structures based on such relations among students, demonstrating the existence of complex hierarchical structures among communities. Differentiating between students' rank (verticality) and embeddedness (horizontality), the analysis reveals orthogonal processes of stratification: A student's rank is associated with their social role at the school, whereas their embeddedness is linked to traditional markers of stratification, such as race and income. The analysis demonstrates the theoretical utility of incorporating ambiguity of status relations and provides a flexible set of statistical tools to study relational status hierarchies.

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