Preschool Age Children's Friendships: Formation, Maintenance, and Consequences

Auburn University, Auburn AL

Investigators

Abstract

Making and keeping friends is a life-span developmental task that is related to general psychosocial adjustment, to feelings of well-being, and to feelings of 'connectedness' with others from early childhood through old age. Young children failing to make and keep friends are often characterized as lacking social competence, older children/adolescents without friends are frequently characterized in terms of personality deficits and social deviance, and friendless elderly persons are often described as disconnected from the larger social world. Having friends and being a friend are considered generally positive qualities, but recent reviews and descriptive empirical studies have also pointed out that having the 'wrong' friends or participating in 'low quality friendships' can promote sub-optimal developmental trajectories. There is, however, relatively little research evidence documenting the formation and maintenance of friendships varying in terms of "quality," and even less research has focused on potential influences of friendship quality over significant periods of time in stable and changing groups of young children. Very few studies of children's friendships adopt experimental designs to test hypotheses concerning the role of friendship (or friendship quality) as a determinant of developmental outcome. Finally, studies of friendships rarely attempt to coordinate this domain with other relational dimensions salient to children, such as social dominance. This project is proposed as an effort to provide both descriptive and quasi-experimental data concerning antecedents to, correlates of, and outcomes associated with participation in a range of friendships in a large sample of preschool-age children. In a longitudinal study, observations of peer-directed behavior, interviews, and adult ratings (teacher, parent) will be used to characterize individual differences in children's social competence and social dominance with peers. Relevant academic readiness/accomplishment data will also be gathered from parent/teacher ratings and classroom documentation. Antecedent variables will include child temperament/personality, demographic attributes (gender, age, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, general physical health and attendance records), and teacher/child relationship indicators. Friendship dyads will be determined on the basis of sociometric and/or proximity data (as appropriate for children of different ages). Outcome measures will include assessments from domains of peer social competence, social interactions with friends and acquaintances in natural and laboratory contexts, competition and aggression based social hierarchies, and stability of friendships over time. Descriptive analyses will document the range of friendship quality (along multiple cross-tabulated dimensions) characterizing children from the late toddler period (30-42 months) to kindergarten age (approximately 60-70 months), relations between friendship quality, social competence, and social dominance across this range of ages, and relative influences of adult/child (teacher) versus peer relationships on subsequent measures of social competence, social interactions, and stability of friendships. This study will provide broadly descriptive and prescriptive characterizations of friendships and friendship quality across the preschool period and will explicitly consider friendship and dominance relationships as interactive co-determinants of peer-directed social behavior in the peer groups of young children.