2-052 - A More Detailed Examination of Friendship Experiences in the Lives of Adolescents

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

In the past fifty years, it has become clear that friends “matter” in the lives of adolescents (Rubin, Bukowski, & Bowker, 2015). Most research has tended to focus exclusively on two broad indices of friendship: mutual friendship involvement and overall friendship quality or support. However, growing evidence suggests friends’ characteristics and specific features of friendship quality can also uniquely impact adolescents’ adjustment. In addition, there is some indication that temporal approaches to friendship, which acknowledge that friendship is not a static construct, oftentimes yield more detailed information about why and how friends influence adolescent psychosocial well-being.

This symposium extends the research on friendship by providing new and more nuanced insight into the features of and variability in friendship experiences during adolescence. The first paper is novel in its exploration of how friendship security versus intimacy alters the stability of three components of anxiety during early adolescence. The second considers, for the first time, the characteristics of adolescents who nominate aggressive-popular adolescents as friends and affiliates. The last paper adopts a temporal approach and is unique in its evaluation of interview data from adolescents on turning points in the history of their best-friendships. These papers use different approaches to measuring the characteristics and qualities of adolescents’ friendship experiences, utilize culturally diverse samples (US, Lithuania, Canada), and together expand knowledge about aspects of adolescents’ friendship experiences that are oftentimes neglected by researchers. The papers will be evaluated and discussed by a senior scholar who has studied friendship for more than thirty years.

Sub Unit

• Social Relationships

Chair

• Julie C Bowker, University at Buffalo, SUNY

Discussant

• Kenneth H. Rubin, Department of Human Development & Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland

Individual Presentations

• Intolerance of uncertainty and anxious arousal in early adolescence: The importance of friendship security - Presenting Author: Bianca Panarello, Concordia University; Non-Presenting Author: William M. Bukowski, Concordia University

• Being friends with popular aggressive adolescents: It’s not for everyone - Presenting Author: Daniel J. Dickson, Concordia University; Non-Presenting Author: Cody Hiatt, Florida Atlantic University; Non-Presenting Author: Brett Laursen, Florida Atlantic University; Non-Presenting Author: Rita Zukauskiene, Mykolas Romeris University

• A new approach to studying the “ups” and “downs” in young adolescents’ friendships - Presenting Author: Julie C Bowker, University at Buffalo, SUNY; Non-Presenting Author: Miriam T Stotsky, University at Buffalo, SUNY; Non-Presenting Author: Rebecca G. Etkin, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York