Michele Rossi, a doctoral student at UC Berkeley, decided to research a demographic not given enough attention: white, lower-middle-class, teenage girls.

In her paper, presented to the American Sociological Association on Friday, she described what she called “getting-by girls” — high school girls who prioritize their social lives over their studies and only do what is necessary to achieve passable — albeit average — grades.

Rossi’s subjects came from a Northeastern high school. She interviewed 26 lower-middle-class girls from the same school, as well as 17 academic-minded “overachievers” with upper-middle-class backgrounds and 13 lower-class “nowhere kids,” who have no aspirations toward attending college. She also interviewed 30 students’ mothers.

Getting-by girls haven’t often been studied because, according to Rossi, the social sciences focus more on members of the upper-middle class and above, because of their influential status, and marginalized people, out of pity or concern. She said this particular group were not people “you would necessarily feel sorry for” or “consider important or envy.”

Rossi said she became interested in the behavior of these girls during her time as a graduate student instructor after consoling her distraught UC Berkeley undergraduate students, who had been overachievers in high school. They had been under academic pressure since eighth grade, she said, and were having “meltdowns.”

“If this is what’s happening to them and affecting how they think about their prospects for the future,” she said, “what does it look like for girls who necessarily aren’t the winners in this kind of competition?”

The answer is not entirely clear. According to Rossi, job growth is most pronounced in the STEM fields — science, technology, engineering or mathematics, which require advanced, specialized education — and jobs which don’t even require a high school diploma — positions getting-by girls would be overqualified for. Jobs in between those two extremes, she said, have been disappearing over the last 40 years.

Robbie Short, a senior at Roseville High School, which he describes as “not the most affluent” school in the Roseville, California, area, said the characters of the subjects Rossi observed were not unique to lower-middle-class girls.

“You’re not your demographics,” he said. “I know people who are … lower class, and they’re very driven academically. They know what they want to do, and they have intellectual pursuits that rival even those students that are rather wealthy.”

Maddy Pilgrim, another senior at the same school, said her older sister met Rossi’s getting-by girl archetype. When Pilgrim was a freshman, her sister, then a senior, was in the same math class as her.

“If you don’t use high school for what it’s for and just use it as more of a social (outlet), you’ll just keep trying to be more social after high school,” she said. “(Getting-by girls) don’t have the education they need — just the social skills.”

Contact G. Haley Massara at gmassara@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter @BylineGraph.