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

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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.
Table 1 Items and Subscales of the Friendship Quality Questionnaire Structure Subscale/item" coefficient Validation and Caring (a = .90) 15. Makes me feel good about my ideas 4. Tells me I am good at things 6. Make each other feel important and special 13. Tells me I am pretty smart 8. Says "I'm sorry" if [he/she] hurts my feelings 5. Sticks up for me if others talk behind my back 10. Has good ideas about games to play 41. Cares about my feelings 12. Would like me even if others didn't 30. Does not tell others my secrets Conflict Resolution (a = .73) 26. Make up easily when we have a fight 35. Get over our arguments really quickly 11. Talk about how to get over being mad at each other Conflict and Betrayal (a = .84) 20. Argue a lot 27. Fight a lot 3. Get mad a lot 37. Doesn't listen to me 31. Bug each other a lot 9. Sometimes says mean things about me to other kids 21. Can count on to keep promises Help and Guidance (a = .90) 34. Helps me so I can get done quicker 39. Help each other with schoolwork a lot 24. Gives advice with figuring things out 36. Count on each other for good ideas on how to get things done 32. Come up with good ideas on ways to do things 33. Loan each other things all the time 28. Share things with each other 18. Do special favors for each other 17. Help each other with chores a lot Companionship and Recreation (a = .75) 2. Always sit together at lunch 7. Always pick each other as partners for things 23. Always play together at recess 19. Do fun things together a lot 22. Go to each others' houses Intimate Exchange (a = .86) 14. Always tell each other our problems 25. Talk about the things that make us sad 16. Talk to her when I'm mad about something that happened to me 40. Tell each other secrets 38. Tell each other private things 29. Talk about how to make ourselves feel better if we are mad at each other FRIENDSHIP AND FRIENDSHIP QUALITY .783 .780 .729 .703 .695 .662 .644 .635 .595 .547 .880 .840 .573 .844 .822 .782 .696 .652 .638 .635 .823 .768 .757 .744 .702 .640 .595 .576 .567 .802 .728 .690 .660 .571 .755 .740 .709 .690 .674 .653 a Numbers are item numbers from the Friendship Quality Question- naire. ings of loneliness and social dissatisfaction, uncontaminated by their appraisals of the quality of their friendships, their perception of their social competence, or their estimate of the state of their current peer relationships. The internal consistency of this 3-item pure scale was a 615 = .11. The correlation between the pure loneliness scale and the larger, 16-item scale was .84. Whenever loneliness and social dissatisfaction was analyzed in relation to measures of friendship quality, the 3-item pure loneliness scale was substituted for the 16-item measure, and this fact is noted accordingly. For the sake of continuity with other research, scores for the larger scale were used in analyses in which the possibility of overlapping content was not an issue (i.e., in analyses that did not involve friendship quality or friendship satisfaction). Procedure In the late fall, the parents of all children in the third through fifth grades of each participating school were mailed first-class letters describing the study. Parents were asked to contact either the principal or the experimenters if they did not want their child to participate or if they required more information about the study before deciding. Data collection took place in three sessions in the winter and spring of the school year. Each session lasted about 1 hr. The first session began with an introduction to the project and project staff. This introduction stressed that participation was voluntary and confidential. After this, we administered sociometric measures to assess peer acceptance and to identify best friendships. Other measures were also administered in this session that are not relevant to the present study. In the second session, approximately 1 month later, the loneliness and social dissatisfaction questionnaire was administered. In the third session, several weeks later, children's perception of the quality of their best friendship was assessed, as was their satisfaction with their friendship. All measures were group administered in class, and each session was conducted by a different investigator to minimize reactivity across sessions. Preliminary Analyses Results Preliminary analyses indicated that children's grade level was not significantly related to any of the independent and dependent variables under consideration. Furthermore, there were no instances in which it was necessary to qualify any of the findings on the basis of grade. However, including grade did adversely affect the size of some cells in several analyses. For this reason, the analyses reported here are derived after collapsing the data across grades. Prevalence of Friendship Using the criterion of reciprocated best friendship, 77.6% of the children in this sample had at least one friend. However, as noted earlier, 484, or 54.9%, of the 881 children in the sample had very best friends. Thus, the narrowing of the focus from best friendship to very best friendship had the impact of doubling the proportion of friendless children identified (45.1% vs. 22.4%). Of primary interest was the prevalence of best friendship among groups of children differing in level of acceptance. We expected that the likelihood of friendship would increase as level of acceptance increased but that many low-accepted children would nevertheless have friends. Logit analysis was used to model the odds of having versus not having a mutual best friend as a function of children's gender and level of acceptance. We evaluated the significance of individual terms (main effects
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Page 7 and 8: erately to highly intercorrelated,
Page 9 and 10: Table 4 Summary of Hierarchical Reg
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