Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
 Peer Relations
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What functions do peer groups serve?
How are family and peer relations linked?
How extensively do adolescents engage in conformity?
What kinds of statuses do peers have?
 Peer Group Functions
 Adolescents have strong needs to be liked and accepted by
friends and the larger peer group.
 To many adolescents, how they are seen by peers is the most
important aspect of their lives.
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
 Peers
 Individuals who are about the same age or maturity level.
 Same-age peer interaction serves a unique role in U.S.
culture.
 Age grading would occur even if schools were not graded
and adolescents were left alone to determine the
composition of their own societies.
 One of the most important functions of the peer group is to
provide a source of information about the world outside the
family.
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
 Peer Contexts
 Peer interaction is influenced by contexts, which can include
the type of peer the adolescent interacts with.
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An acquaintance
A crowd
A clique
A friend
A romantic partner
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
 Peer Contexts (Continued)
 Peer interaction is also influenced by the situation or
location where they are.
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School
Neighborhood
Community center
Dance
Religious setting
Sporting event
Culture (Brown & Larson, 2009; Brown & others, 2008)
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
 Individual Difference Factors
 Among the wide range of individual differences that can
affect peer relations are personality traits.
 Other individual differences include:
 How open the adolescent is to peer influence.
 The status/power of the adolescent versus the status/power of the
other adolescent or adolescent peer group (Brown & Larson, 2009;
Brown & others, 2008).
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
 Developmental Changes in Time Spent with Peers
 Boys and girls spend an increasing amount of time in peer
interaction during middle and late childhood and adolescence.
 By adolescence, peer relations occupy large chunks of an
individual’s life.
 In one investigation, over the course of one weekend, young
adolescent boys and girls spent more than twice as much time
with peers than with parents (Condry, Simon, & Bronfenbrenner,
1968).
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
 Are Peers Necessary for Development?
 Good peer relations might be necessary for normal social
development in adolescence.
 Social isolation is linked with many different forms of
problems and disorders, ranging from delinquency and
problem drinking to depression (Dishion, Piehler, & Myers, 2008).
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
 Positive Peer Relations
 Through peer interaction children and adolescents learn the
symmetrical reciprocity mode of relationships.
 Adolescents explore the principles of fairness and justice by
working through disagreements with peers.
 They also learn to be keen observers of peers’ interests and
perspectives in order to smoothly integrate themselves into
ongoing peer activities.
 Adolescents learn to be skilled and sensitive partners in
intimate relationships.
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
 Negative Peer Relations
 Being rejected or overlooked by peers leads some adolescents
to feel lonely or hostile.
 Rejection and neglect by peers are related to an individual’s
subsequent mental health and criminal problems (Bukowski,
Brendgen, & Vitaro, 2007).
 Time spent hanging out with antisocial peers in adolescence
was a stronger predictor of substance abuse than time spent
with parents (Nation & Heflinger, 2006).
 Deviant peer affiliation was related to adolescents’ depressive
symptoms (Connell & Dishion, 2006).
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
• Family-Peer Linkages
• Parents have little authority over adolescents’ choices in some
areas but more authority of choices in other areas.
• Adolescents do show a strong motivation to be with their
peers and become independent.
• Adolescents live in a connected world with parents and peers,
not a disconnected one (Allen & Antonishak, 2008;Dodge &
others, 2006).
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
• Family-Peer Linkages (Continued)
• What are some of the ways the worlds of parents and peers
are connected?
• Parents’ choices of neighborhoods, churches, schools, and their own
friends influence the pool from which their adolescents select possible
friends (Cooper & Ayers-Lopez, 1985).
• Parents can model or coach their adolescents in ways of relating to
peers.
• Secure attachment to parents is related to the adolescent’s positive
peer relations (Allen & Antonishak, 2008).
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
• Peer Pressure
• Young adolescents conform more to peer standards than
children do.
• Around the 8th and 9th grades, conformity to peers—especially
to their antisocial standards—peaks (Berndt, 1979; Brown &
Larson, 2009; Brown & others, 2008).
• A recent study revealed that 14 to 18 years of age is an
especially important time for developing the ability to stand
up for what one believes and resist peer pressure to do
otherwise (Steinberg & Monahan, 2007).
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
• Peer Pressure (Continued)
• Which adolescents are most likely to conform?
• Cohen & Prinstein, 2006; Prinstein, 2007; Prinstein & Dodge, 2008
have concluded the following adolescents are more likely to
conform:
• Adolescents who are uncertain about their social identity.
• Have low self-esteem.
• Have high social anxiety.
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
• Peer Statuses
• The term sociometric status is used to describe the extent to which children
and adolescents are liked or disliked by their peer group.
– Assessed by asking children to rate how much they like or dislike each of
their classmates.
– Also assessed by asking children and adolescents to nominate the peers
they like and those they like the least.
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
• Peer Statuses (Continued)
• Developmentalists have distinguished five types of peer
statuses (Wentzel & Asher, 1995).
• Popular children
• Are frequently nominated as a best friend and are rarely disliked by their
peers.
• Average children
• Receive an average number of both positive and negative nominations from
their peers.
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
• Peer Statuses (Continued)
• Neglected children
• Are infrequently nominated as a best friend but are not disliked by their
peers.
• Rejected children
• Are infrequently nominated as someone’s best friend and are actively
disliked by their peers.
• Controversial children
• Are frequently nominated both as someone’s best friend and as being
disliked.
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
• An analysis by John Coie (2004, pp. 252-253) provided three reasons
why aggressive peer-rejected boys have problems in social
relationships.
1.
Rejected, aggressive boys are more impulsive and have problems
sustaining attention.
2.
Rejected, aggressive boys are more emotionally reactive.
3.
Rejected children have fewer social skills in making friends and
maintaining positive relationships with peers.
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
• Not all rejected children are aggressive (Hymel, McDougall, &
Renshaw, 2004).
• Approximately 10 to 20 percent of rejected children are shy.
• Much of the peer status research involves samples from middle
and late childhood, and in some cases early adolescence, but not
late adolescence.
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
• Social Cognition and Emotion
• Social cognitive skills and social knowledge of adolescents are
important aspects of successful peer relations. So is the ability
to manage and regulate one’s emotions.
• Social cognition involves thoughts about social matters
(Smetana & Villalobos, 2009).
• A distinction can be made between knowledge and process in
social cognition.
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
• Social Cognition
• As children move into adolescence, they acquire more social
knowledge.
• There is considerable individual variation in how much one
adolescent knows about what it takes to make friends.
• From a social cognitive perspective, children and adolescents
may have difficulty in peer relations because they lack
appropriate social cognitive skills (Bibok, Carpendale, & Lewis,
2008: Mueller & others, 2008; Rah & Parke, 2008).
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
Generation of Alternative Solutions and Adaptive Planning by
Negative- and Positive-Peer-Status Boys
Fig. 9.1
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
• Emotion
• Not only does cognition play an important role in peer
relations, so does emotion.
• Moody and emotionally negative individuals experience
greater rejection by peers.
• Emotionally positive individuals are more popular (Saarni &
others, 2006).
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
• Strategies for Improving Social Skills
• Conglomerate strategies (coaching)
– Involves the use of a combination of techniques, rather than a single
approach, to improve adolescents’ social skills.
– A conglomerate strategy may consist of:
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Modeling of appropriate social skills.
Discussion.
Reasoning about the social skills.
Reinforcement for enactment in actual social situations.
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
• Strategies for Improving Social Skills (Continued)
• Social-skills training programs have generally been more
successful with children 10 years of age or younger than with
adolescents (Malik & Furman, 1993).
• Peer reputations become more fixed as cliques and peer groups
become more significant in adolescence.
• Once an adolescent gains a negative reputation among peers as
being “mean,” “weird,” or a “loner,” the peer group’s attitude is
often slow to change, even after the adolescent’s problem
behavior has been corrected.
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
• Friendship
• Friends are a subset of peers who engage in mutual
companionship, support, and intimacy.
• Relationships with friends are much closer and more involved
than is the case with the peer group.
• Some adolescents have several close friends, others one, and
yet others none.
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
The Functions of Friendship
Companionship
Stimulation
Physical support
Ego support
Social Comparison
Intimacy/affection
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
• Harry Stack Sullivan’s (1953) Ideas on Changes in Friendship in
Early Adolescence
• Sullivan argued that friends are important in shaping the development of
children and adolescents.
• During adolescence, said Sullivan, friends become increasingly important
in meeting social needs.
• Sullivan argued that the need for intimacy intensifies during early
adolescence, motivating teenagers to seek out close friends.
• If adolescents failed to forge such close friendships, they experience
loneliness and a reduced sense of self-worth.
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
Developmental Changes in Self-Disclosing Conversations
Fig. 9.3
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
• Viewed from the developmental constructionist perspective
adolescent friendship represents a new mode of relating to
others that is best described as a symmetrical intimate mode.
• The greater intimacy of adolescent friendships demands requires
learning a number of close relationship competencies, including:
• Knowing how to self-disclose appropriately.
• Being able to provide emotional support to friends.
• Managing disagreements in ways that do not undermine the intimacy of the
friendship.
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
• Intimacy
• Defined broadly it includes everything in a relationship that
makes the relationship seem close or intense.
• Defined narrowly as self-disclosure or sharing of private
thoughts.
• The most consistent finding in the last two decades of
research on adolescent friendships is that intimacy is an
important feature of friendship (Selman, 1980).
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
• Similarity
• Friends are generally similar—in terms of age, sex, ethnicity,
and other factors.
• Similarity is referred to as homophily, the tendency to
associate with similar others (Prinstein & Dodge, 2008: Rubin,
Fredstorm, & Bowker, 2008).
• Friends often have similar attitudes toward school, similar
educational aspirations, and closely aligned achievement
orientations.
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
• Loneliness
• For some individuals loneliness is a chronic condition.
• Chronic loneliness is linked with impaired physical and mental
health (Karnick, 2008).
• It is important to distinguish loneliness from the desire for solitude.
Exploring Peer Relations and Friendship
• Loneliness (Continued)
• Loneliness is often interwoven with the passage through life
transitions:
• A move to a different part of the country.
• A divorce.
• The death of a close friend or family member.
• The first year of college may create loneliness especially if
students leave the familiar world of their hometown and
family to enter college.
Dating and Romantic Relationships
 Functions of Dating
 Dating is a relatively recent phenomenon.
 In the 1920s, it became a reality.
 Its primary role was to select and win a mate.
 Dating has evolved into something more than just courtship for
marriage.
Dating and Romantic Relationships
 Dating today can serve at least seven functions (Paul & White,
1990):
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Recreation.
Source of status and achievement.
Part of the socialization process.
Involves learning about intimacy.
Provide companionship.
Identity formation and development.
A means of mate sorting and selection.
Adolescent Groups
Age of Onset of Romantic Activity
Fig. 9.5
Dating and Romantic Relationships
 Emotion, Adjustment, and Romantic Relationships
 Romantic emotions can envelop adolescents’ and emerging
adults’ lives (Connolly & McIssac, 2009).
 Emotions are positive, in others negative.
 A concern is that in some cases the negative emotions are too
intense and prolonged, and can lead to adjustment problems.
 Dating and Adjustment
 Linked with various measures of how well adjusted
adolescents are (Barber, 2006; Connolly & McIssac, 2009).
Dating and Romantic Relationships
 Dissolution of a Romantic Relationship
 Being in love when love is not returned can lead to:
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Depression.
Obsessive thoughts.
Sexual dysfunction.
Inability to work effectively.
Difficulty in making new friends.
Self-condemnation.
Thinking clearly in such relationships is often difficult, because the
person is so colored by arousing emotions.
Dating and Romantic Relationships
 Dissolution of a Romantic Relationship
 Studies of romantic breakups have mainly focused on their
negative aspects (Kato, 2005).
 Few studies have examined the possibility that a romantic
breakup might lead to positive changes (Sbarra & Ferrer, 2006).