Relationships between people
Friendships
Queenbees and Wannabes (NF 152.4) is the most influential book on girls' friends ships in the last 20 years and still frames the way we talk about them. The film Mean Girls was a direct response to the way the media portrayed these findings. anyone studying friendships or bully would definitely read the first chapter, "Cliques and Popularity" as a starting point for their research, but other sections may also be relevant. To start you off, I posted chapter 1 on your Edmodo page.
- Cliques and Popularity - categorises the roles of girls in friendship groups
- Nasty girls - looks at conflict arising from the labels we give each other
- Power Plays - gives and analyses examples of conflict
- Pleasing boys; betraying girls - looks at what happens when relationships are formed outside the group
Making Friends – Strategies to Improve Social Understanding and Friendship Skills
social norms and morals How can social pressure influence behavior when norms are heterogeneous?
A Survival Analysis of Adolescent Friendships: The Downside of Dissimilarity found that "differences in sex, peer acceptance, physical aggression, and school competence predicted subsequent friendship dissolution"
Positive friendships
Friend influence on prosocial behavior: The role of motivational factors and friendship characteristics. The author has kindly sent me a copy of this article for your use. I can't post it here (cause it's a public site) so check your edmodo for a copy. It identifies three key components of a friendship that are linked to positive peer influence - how stable the friendship is, how intense the friendship is and how often they interact.
Negative aspects
Associations between aspects of friendship networks and dietary behavior in youth: Findings from a systematized review
Toxic Friendships - lists how to recognise them and how to escape them
Friendship and academic results
in schools the key point on freindship seesm to be reciprocal freindships. I'd start with defining this and explaining how it contrasts with other types of freindships.
this is where I''d discuss methodology in terms of tools used to meaure freindship (that you'll use in your survey)
then I'd look at positive and negative peer pressue in a genderal kind of way
then I'd look specifically at what happens in schools.
this is where I''d discuss methodology in terms of tools used to meaure freindship (that you'll use in your survey)
then I'd look at positive and negative peer pressue in a genderal kind of way
then I'd look specifically at what happens in schools.
- Academic Functioning and Peer Influences: A Short-Term Longitudinal Study of Network-Behavior Dynamics in Middle Adolescence found that "Friends influenced one another to increase rather than decrease in achievement and truancy."
- The Friendship Dilemma: Competition and Emotional Isolation explores the effect of competition between freinds in Chinese classrooms
- Friends in School: Patterns of selection and Influence looks at freindship for many different perspectives. It includes a chapter on the Influence of freidns on achievement, but that chapter isn't available in the goole preview.
- Friendship Quality and School Achievement: A Longitudinal Analysis During Primary School found that academic achievement and freindship choices equally influence each other in yr2-3 Italian students
- How Academic Failures Break Up Friendship Ties: Social Networks and Retakes states that "over time students with low academic achievements become socially isolated that increases their risk of dropping out." This is supporteed by Dropping out of high school: The role of parent and teacher self-determination support, reciprocal friendships and academic motivation:" reciprocal friendships contributed to the prediction of dropping out of high school, above and beyond the effects of academic motivation, or parent and teacher support for basic psychological needs.... a lack of reciprocal friendships had detrimental effects ..., whereas having reciprocal friendships lead to favorable outcomes."
- Do social self-efficacy and self-esteem moderate the relationship between peer victimization and academic performance?"he interaction of self-efficacy and self-esteem may moderate the relationship between peer victimization and academic performance. Those with above average social self-efficacy reported lower peer victimization and depression as well as higher academic performance."
- Longitudinal associations between depressive problems, academic performance, and social functioning in adolescent boys and girls. found that "Poor social well-being was predicted by depressive problems but not the other way around. The relation between depressive and social problems was bidirectional, that is, they predicted each other. Finally, depressive problems and academic performance were bidirectionally related as well but only in girls. "
- Young children's beliefs about self-disclosure of performance failure and success.shows that children start realising it's not polite to share aceademic results dueinrg preschool.
Children's Beliefs About Self-disclosure to Friends Regarding Academic Achievement shows that chinese high school students think it depends on how you performed compared to the person you're talking to (note that china has a highly competitive school culture). - Peer Influence on Academic Performance: A Social Network Analysis of Social-Emotional Intervention Effects suggests that putting students into mizxec ability rather than freinds hip groups will improve perfomrance
Tools for measuring friendship
Friendship Quality Scale: Conceptualization, Development and Validation includes five areas in which to assess a freindship
Perceived influence of close friends, well-liked peers, and popular peers identifies three ways to assess the quality of friendships: affective quality, interaction frequency, and friendship stability (you'd need to define each of these)
Friendship Quality Scale: Conceptualization, Development and Validation includes five areas in which to assess a freindship
Perceived influence of close friends, well-liked peers, and popular peers identifies three ways to assess the quality of friendships: affective quality, interaction frequency, and friendship stability (you'd need to define each of these)
Conflict in friendship groups
- If you're studying this topic you might want to look more at the effects of the conflict on well being as it's hard to find direct connections between peer pressure and these kinds of conflict (which are how the peer pressure functions) unless it's looking at risk-taking behaviours such as drinking, smoking, drug-taking and criminal/delinquent activity which would be hard to research at this level. You could also list the different sorts of behaviour involved in relational aggression or the ways people cope with it and compare across different ages, ethnic origins, or even (in yr 7/8) enrichment vs mainstream classes.
The psychological term for the "frenemy" type relationships between teenage girls is "relational aggression". What you need to know about girls and their frenemies gives a good overview of how it works. Relational Aggression and the Impact it has on Female Adolescents has a more academic definition on pp7-9. It also includes (p.61ff) the survey they used in their research (yours will be very different but you might gets some ideas here).
- The Secret Traders: A case study investigating adolescent girls and relational aggression and the impacts of popularity and meanness looks at friendships as an "economy" with secrets (and therefore reputation) as the currency (money). Read the conclusion that starts on p.127.‘They Turned Around Like I Wasn’t There’ An Analysis of Teenage Girls’ Letters About Their Peer Conflicts (needs a library login to read it)
- Adolescent Girls’ Peer Conflicts: Friendship and Relational Aggression (online)
Dealing with relational Aggression
- The Ways of Coping Checklist: Revision and Psychometric Properties is not at all related to your research but it has an excellent list different ways people cope with relational aggression based on active problem-solving, seeking social support, blaming self, wishful thinking and avoidance (Table 2 on pp8-9) that would be perfect for your survey if you're looking at ways of coping with conflict.
- Adolescent Girls' Coping With Relational Aggression looks at how girls use these strategies. If you're doing a PIP, you m,ight want to look at this PhD thesis as well Coping strategies of Young girls victimised by relational aggression.
Coping Strategies
- Predicting Friendship Stability During Early Adolescence has a fabulous questionnaire in the appendix. Use the five sections of the questionnaire as the five subheadings for your literature review.
- Examining Two Types of Best Friendship Dissolution During Early Adolescence identifies two types of friendship destruction dissolution (breakign up) and downgrading (becoming less good friends). Read the discussion about this on 965-668