Poster #129 - Beyond Reciprocal Self-Disclosure: Factors That Facilitate Children’s Feelings of Closeness When Making “Fast Friends” Online

• In Event: Poster Session 09

Abstract

Close peer relationships are critical to children’s healthy development and well-being. In the present work, we tested whether an online version of the Fast Friends paradigm could engender closeness between children and explored mechanisms that facilitate feelings of closeness. The study sample consisted of 262 9-13-year-old children. Participant dyads matched in age and gender were randomly assigned to answer personal questions and play a collaborative game (Fast Friends condition) or a control condition. Closeness ratings were collected immediately after the study activities. Sessions were recorded, affording the opportunity to code for not only reciprocal self-disclosure, the presumed mechanism underlying feelings of closeness, but other potential mechanisms as well (e.g., connecting through similarity, energy levels, matches in maturity).
The online version of the Fast Friends paradigm was effective; Fast Friends dyads reported feeling closer than control dyads. The videos and transcripts from the sessions will be coded for evidence of self-disclosure. Though it has long been assumed that the Fast Friends procedure elicits reciprocal self-disclosure and this self-disclosure underlies feelings of closeness, the mechanism has not been formally tested. We plan to test this relationship in our sample. We will code participants' interactions for the degree to which they engaged in self-disclosure. We predict that, supporting assumptions in the literature, higher levels of self-disclosure will be associated with greater feelings of closeness. We anticipate, however, that with children there may be other mechanisms that may play a role in facilitating feelings of closeness. Our interest in examining other factors was initially stimulated while conducting study sessions. We observed, for example, that some children seemed to get along well but did not report feelings of closeness and other children did not disclose much but reported feeling close. We also consulted the friendship literature to identify other factors related to enhanced positive feelings and closeness (e.g., similarity is associated with close relationships, shy/withdrawn children are often friends with other shy/withdrawn children). Based on these considerations, we will also code the session videos for how easily children found similarities, their energy level, match in maturity, how well they worked together as a team, and the overall success of the interaction. We predict that all of these factors will be related to how close children felt to their interaction partner. We will examine the associations among each factor with closeness and each other. For our preregistered analyses, we plan to first examine correlations and then conduct a simultaneous regression analysis to examine the relative strength of each factor in predicting closeness.
In this poster, we will consider potential uses of this adapted Fast Friends procedure, when this type of procedure may be most useful, and the implications of this procedure for children’s well-being. The session videos and transcripts may also be instructive for future work, such as helping us identify questions that are particularly effective at facilitating mechanisms that lead to feelings of closeness, such as self-disclosure or finding similarities.

Authors

• Katherine Lynn Swerbenski, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author

• Kierin Barnett, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Patricia G. Devine, University of Wissonsin

• Kristin Shutts, University of Wisconsin - Madison