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A Friend in Need is a Friend Indeed? Examining the Interplay of Early Adolescents’ Friendship and Helping Relations

Sat, April 14, 3:45 to 5:15pm, Hilton, Floor: Third Floor, Board Room 3

Abstract/Description

INTRODUCTION: Early adolescence is a phase characterized by many challenges, including changing relationships with parents and peers, and increased educational demands. In dealing with these hassles, adolescents do not only rely on their own problem-solving capacities, but seek help from others. Starting in early adolescence, peers take up a central role in adolescents’ social support network, whereas the role of parents diminishes. As the opinions of and relations with peers become more salient, exchanging help within the peer group gains importance. Previous research established that friendship is a salient context in which helping takes place, and highlighted help as being part of the definition of and expectations surrounding friendship. However, this picture is likely incomplete, as the interrelatedness of friendship and help is quite complex. First, the associations between friendship and helping are bidirectional: Not only does friendship give rise to helping, helping may also function as bridge to establish friendships. Second, friendships and helping interactions are directional: They can be mutually oriented or non-mutual, implying that there are many configurations in which friendship and helping may coincide. Third, friendship and helping develop over time: They emerge and may be maintained, and each can contribute to the initiation and maintenance of the other.
GOALS: This study will take these notions into account in studying the interrelatedness of friendship and helping. We identified early adolescents’ friendships and helping interactions by asking participants to nominate classmates who are their best friends and, in a second question, who help them. Adopting such a peer nomination method, by which we regard friendships and helping as networks, allows us to assess directionality, and distinguish between multiple configurations in which friendship and helping coincide. For example, two individuals might regard each other as friend (mutual relation), but only one of them might help the other (non-mutual relation). In addition, we assessed friendship and helping at three time points across one school year, allowing us to examine both initiation and maintenance of friendship and help, and assess bidirectional associations. As such, we can examine effects of mutuality in friendship and helping on the initiation and maintenance of helping and friendship, respectively.
METHODS: The interplay between friendship and helping networks was examined using data from the Dutch SNARE study (N=1130, Mage=12.66, 49.9% boys), and analyzed using Bayesian longitudinal social network analyses implemented in RSiena, in which the friendship and helping network alternately took up the role of the explanatory network and dependent network.
RESULTS: Preliminary results suggested that friendship is indeed a context that fosters helping interactions, as befriending peers was associated with the initiation and maintenance of helping. Furthermore, whereas mutual helping was particularly salient for friendship maintenance (not initiation), non-mutual helping was relevant for friendship initiation, and to a lesser extent for friendship maintenance. Further analyses will reveal whether our data supported the remaining hypotheses.
CONCLUSION: This study revealed interdependencies between friendship and helping relations of early adolescents with their peers, and may as such aid in understanding the complexities of the adolescent social world.

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