Friendship and Friendship Quality in Middle Childhood ... - Psychology

614 JEFFREY G. PARKER AND STEVEN R. ASHER
list of three best-friend choices. In other words, it was not necessary
that the chosen classmate designate the choosing child as a very best
friend (as opposed to a best friend) in order for the choosing child to be
considered to have a very best friend, although this strict reciprocity
held for 266 (55%) of the 484 cases of children who were identified as
having a very best friend. 3
In addition to this primary operationalization of friendship, a second,
more inclusive criterion for friendship was established. For this
second operationalization, children's "very best" designations were
ignored. Thus, best (as opposed to very best) friendship was defined as a
reciprocity across children for any of their three best-friend nominations.
Unlike the more restrictive primary criterion, then, children
could have more than one (but no more than three) best friendships by
this criterion. We felt that this supplemental operationalization of
friendship was essential to a comprehensive appraisal of children's participation
in friendship. It also was of interest by virtue of being more
directly comparable with operationalizations used in past studies.
Friendship quality We examined the quality of children's very best
friendship by using a questionnaire designed to assess children's perceptions
of various qualitative aspects of their very best friendship.
This questionnaire, the Friendship Quality Questionnaire (FQQ). contained
40 primary items and an initial "warm-up" item. The items
asked children to indicate on a 5-point scale how true a particular
quality is of their relationship with a specific friend (e.g., "Jamie and I
loan each other things all the time"). The scale ranged from not at all
true (0) to a little true (1) to somewhat true (2) to pretty true (3) to really
true (4). The child completed the questionnaire with reference to a
specific friend, whose name was inserted at the top of the questionnaire
and embedded in each individual item by using a personal computer
and word-processing software with data-merging capabilities.
This reference to a specific friend was done to discourage children
from completing the questionnaire on the basis of an internal representation
of a stereotypic or idealized friendship or based on a mental
composite of several different friendships. The target friend was the
child's very best mutual friend as determined from the sociometric
assessment described earlier. 4 The questionnaire was group administered
in the child's classroom. We began administration by giving children
instruction in using the scale. After this, children completed the
questionnaire individually. Each item was read aloud to make as few
demands as possible on children's reading ability.
The FQQ evolved over time through two administrations and appraisals
before the present study. An initial pool of potential items was
derived from a similar questionnaire developed by Bukowski et al.
(1987). 5 We made some changes to the wording and response format of
these initial items to clarify potential ambiguities in interpretation. In
addition, the practice of customizing each questionnaire with the
name of a specific friend was introduced. The FQQ was administered
initially to 278 third- through sixth-grade children (see Parker &Asher,
1989) and subsequently to 153 third- through fifth-grade children. We
used each evaluation to identify and replace weak or ambiguous items
and to clarify the underlying factor structure. These evaluations resulted
in the final pool of 40 items used in the present study and are
shown in Table 1. The scoring and the derivation of subscales are described
in the Results section.
Friendship satisfaction. Two questions were used to assess children's
satisfaction with their friendship. These questions were administered
separately from the FQQ. The first question asked, "How is this
friendship going?" The second question asked, "How happy are you
with this friendship?" For both questions, children indicated theirsatisfaction
along a continuum anchored at the low end by a stylized linedrawing
of a frowning, unhappy face and at the opposite, high end by a
complementary stylized line-drawing of a smiling, happy face. Fifteen
evenly spaced ticks were marked along the continuum to assist with
measurement, and a child's score was based on which tick was circled,
with higher scores indicating more satisfaction. To familiarize children
with the use of the scale, we first guided the children through
several examples involving school activities and hobbies. The two
friendship satisfaction questions were then read aloud. The responses
of children with very best friends to the two questions were highly
related (r = .85), and ratings were therefore averaged into a single satisfaction
score for each child.
Loneliness and social dissatisfaction. Children's feelings of loneliness
and social dissatisfaction were assessed by using Asher and
Wheeler's (1985) modification of a 24-item self-report questionnaire
developed by Asher et al. (1984). This questionnaire contains 16 items
focused on feelings of loneliness and social dissatisfaction in school
and 8 filler items. The 16 primary items include four different kinds of
items. These items assessed (a) children's feelings of loneliness (e.g.,
"I'm lonely at school"), (b) children's appraisal of their current peer
relationships (e.g., "I don't have any friends in class"), (c) children's
perceptions of the degree to which important relationship needs are
being met (e.g., "There're no other kids I can go to when I need help at
school"), and (d) children's perceptions of their social competence (e.g.,
"I'm good at working with other children in my class"). Children responded
to each item on a 5-point scale, indicating the degree to which
each statement is a true description of themselves. Total scores could
range from 16 to 80, with greater scores indicating greater loneliness
and social dissatisfaction. This questionnaire has been used in several
studies with elementary school-age children's and has proved to have
excellent internal consistency (Cronbach a > .90; see Asher et al., 1990).
The internal reliability in the present sample was comparable (a = .91).
One limitation of the Asher and Wheeler (1985) measure in the context
of the present study is that a number of its items overlap in content
with items that assess the quality of children's best friendships. This
means that significant correlations could be found between this measure
and items assessing the quality of children's friendships simply
because of the partially overlapping content (see Nicholls, Licht, &
Pearl, 1982, for a discussion of this issue). Accordingly, we constructed
a secondary measure of children's loneliness using a subset of three of
the Asher and Wheeler questionnaire items: "I feel alone at school," "I
feel left out of things at school," and "I'm lonely at school ."This secondary
measure, then, represents a "pure" assessment of children's feel-
3 A small minority of children (n = 3, or less than 1%) failed or refused
to designate one or more friends at the initial step. These children were
excluded from analyses. Another small minority (n = 4, also less than
1 %) indicated one or more friendship choices but failed or refused at the
second step to designate a "very best friend" among the friendship
choices. These children could not be included in analyses requiring
knowledge of their very best friendship. Their data could be used in
other analyses, however, and their choices could be used to examine
the reciprocity of other children's choices. In three additional cases,
children ignored instructions and indicated more than one "very best
friendship" from among the three choices. In these cases, one choice
was randomly designated the very best friendship, within the constraint
that a nonmutual choice could not take precedence over a mutual
choice (one case).
4 For those children without a mutual very best friend, one of the
child's mutual best friendship choices (top three) was substituted. For
children without either type of friendship, the name of the child's unilateral
(i.e., nonreciprocated) very best friend choice was substituted.
These substitutions were necessary to avoid drawing undue attention
during administration to children without mutual very best friends.
Data from subjects without mutual very best friends were excluded
from data analyses concerning the qualities of children's best friendships.
5 We are indebted to William Bukowski and his colleagues for providing
information about the reliability of their items.