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“Smile!”: Emotion Performance as a Strategy for Belonging in Junior High School

This mixed-method research explores how students (ages 12–15) describe dispositional qualities for belonging and fitting in one junior high school. Inductive coding of open-ended responses about perceptions of belonging in school shows candor about the emotional performances and management of emotions for belonging at school. Recommendations for being authentic, nice, and friendly emerged as relevant for belonging. Findings suggest that students perform niceness and friendliness to conform to emotion norms while seeking to retain authenticity. Smiling in particular was referenced as a way to perform niceness and friendliness. Chi-square and binomial logistic regression analyses add context to how advice categories were distributed across status groups at the school. Students who speak a language other than English at home, or with minority religious affiliation were more likely to report a need for authenticity. Female as compared with male students were more likely to suggest each of the three dispositions for belonging in the school. The emotional work of students is noteworthy wherein there are potential sanctions for those not considered nice, or nice enough, and this work augments existing research on school belonging to add the often-missing student voices to enhance the corpus of research about belonging in adolescence.