Family constellations and friendship systems

An individual friendship system is composed of the friends a person has had and/or still has. Individual friendship systems can be characterized objectively in similar ways as can family constellations. The data of a questionnaire study of individual friendship systems and respective family backgrounds of more than 400 subjects revealed greater differentiation and variation with age as well as with the presumed absence of conflict, disruption, and loss in a person's social development. Various interactions between family backgrounds could be traced. To illustrate the practical use of characteristics of a person's individual friendship system two clinical cases matched for age and family background, one with a mild neurotic problem and the other severely disturbed, were compared.Based on a lecture first given at the Family Therapy Symposium of Georgetown University, Washington, DC, on November 9, 1986.     

Sex roles and friendship patterns

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationships among sex, sex role orientation, and friendship. Based on the Bem Sex Role Inventory, 164 participants were categorized as either androgynous (17 males; 29 females), traditional (36 males; 39 females), or undifferentiated (26 males; 17 females) in their sex role orientation. Participants reported the number of close male and female friends, and responded to several questionnaires: interpersonal trust of male and female friends, communal and exchange orientations, affective and activity attributes associated with male and female friends, loneliness, and friendship satisfaction. Results indicate that close friends tended to be same sex, even though females had more close friends overall than did the males. Androgyny was related to characteristics that enhance the development and maintenance of close friendships, such as a communal orientation and positive conceptions of friends, while the undifferentiated orientation was related to less relationship enhancing orientations and a less rewarding interpersonal milieu. The study confirms that sex and sex role orientation are important factors in both quantitative and qualitative aspects of friendship during young adulthood.Portions of this paper were presented at the annual convention of the Southwestern Psychological Association, Houston, Texas, April 13, 1989. We appreciate the extensive help of an anonymous reviewer on earlier versions of this paper.     

角色扮演测评技术用于管理人员选拔的模拟研究

运用角色扮演测评技术,对企业管理人员的选拔进行了模拟研究。结果表明,角色扮演测评技术具有较高的信度和效度,管理者与普通员工的测评结果差异显著,角色扮演测评技术作为一种管理人员选拔工具,具有较强的适用性。此外,不同类型的评分者在对同一批被试进行评价时,评分存在一定的差异,因而须对评分者进行相应的培训;应聘者的性别差异不明显,但20岁以下组与21岁以上各组的年龄差异明显。     

Role-playing as an experimental strategy in social psychology

It is argued that the efficacy of role playing as an experimental strategy should be assessed in terms of its ability to resolve the problems of experimentation in social psychology. Via an epistemological and methodological analysis of the laboratory experiment in social psychology, it is argued that ‘active-experimental’ role playing constitutes a promising experimental strategy, because it can potentially overcome the fundamental experimental problem that arise in virtue of the relational nature of social psychological phenomena. It is stressed that in the end the question of the efficacy of role playing as an experimental strategy is an empirical one, but also that most empirical evaluations are inadequate for two reasons. Most of the role playing groups lack realism and involvement, and the congruence of results in role playing studies of deception experiments (whose validity is questionable) is uncritically taken as both the standard and the criterion for the efficacy of role playing. Both role playing and deception techniques should be assessed in terms of their capacity to achieve experimental realism.     

Female adolescent friendship and delinquent behavior

Young female offenders (n = 29) and female high school students (n = 47) were compared in terms of delinquent behavior and relationships with their best female friend and peer group. Young offenders exhibited significantly more delinquent behavior than did high school students in the past year. Delinquents and nondelinquents did not significantly differ in amount of companionship, conflict, help, security, and closeness with their best female friend, and amount of trust, alienation, and perceived intimacy in their peer group. Less communication and more perceived peer pressure in the peer group distinguished delinquent females from nondelinquent females. Perceived peer pressure significantly predicted delinquent behavior in female adolescents. In short, friendships of delinquent and nondelinquent female adolescents are essentially similar despite higher levels of peer pressure among delinquents.     

Interpersonal constructs and friendship form and structure

Abstract

Two studies examined the relationships between indices of interpersonal construct development and friendship form and structure. In the first study respondents listed activities that they shared with two friends and wrote free-response accounts about why they shared these particular activities with their friends. The accounts were content analyzed. Subsequent analyses showed that both interpersonal construct differentiation and abstractness were positively related to the number of interpersonal attributions made about friendships.

The second study examined the relationship between construct differentiation and structural characteristics of a person's friendship network. Initial correlation analyses showed that construct differentiation was associated with somewhat more segmented friendship networks. Further analyses showed that this effect was limited to ties between friends beyond the inner core.

Together the studies suggest that interpersonal construct development is associated with qualitative differences in how persons define their personal relationships, and with quantitative characteristics of their friendship networks.     

Small group therapy and preadolescent same-sex friendship

On the rationale that group psychotherapy focuses on interaction processes in close relationships, our study sought to investigate the hypothesis that small group therapy would be effective in enhancing intimate friendship in a dyadic relationship. The study group consisted of 102 elementary school students who had been referred for counseling help. Matched by age, sex, and similarity of problem, each pair of students was divided into an experimental group (N = 55) and a control group (N = 47). The experimental group contained eight small treatment groups and the control group contained seven matching small groups, leaving one special education group with no control. The results support our hypothesis that group psychotherapy positively affects intimate friendship of girls and boys. They further suggest the boys' need for such an experience, since without it they markedly deteriorate in intimate friendship. Implications for the group leader are derived from the correlations between gains in intimate friendship and group intimacy.     

The erosion of a friendship

Abstract

The following story is about my childhood friend Amber and the loss of a close relationship. The story traces the relationship from grade school through adolescence. As we grew, we faced different obstacles, at first together and then apart. I follow in the footsteps of Ellis (1995) and Uematsu (1996) in discussing the advantages of writing about loss.     

Superordinate identity and intergroup roommate friendship development

A common ingroup identity promotes positive attitudes and behavior toward members of outgroups, but the durability of these effects and generalizability to relationships outside of the laboratory have been questioned. The present research examined how initial perceptions of common ingroup identity among randomly assigned college roommates provide a foundation for the development of intergroup friendships. For roommate dyads involving students who differed in race or ethnicity, respondents who were low on perceived intergroup commonality showed a significant decline in friendship over-time, whereas those high on perceived commonality showed consistently high levels of friendship. Similarly, participants in these dyads demonstrated a significant decline in feelings of friendship when their roommate was low in perceived commonality but not when their roommate was high in perceived commonality. These effects were partially mediated by anxiety experienced in interactions over-time. The implications of a common identity for intergroup relationship development are discussed.     

Psychosocial development and friendship functions in adolescence

This study concerns the relationship between friendship variables and adolescent psychosocial development, in particular identity and psychosocial intimacy as envisaged by E. Erikson [(1950), Childhood and Society, New York: Norton; (1968), Identity: Youth and Crisis, New York: Norton]. Two hundred and twenty-three secondary school and college students were surveyed regarding friendship networks, beliefs about friendship, functions of friendship in general, and aspects of a best friendship. Intimacy and identity measures were obtained using the Erikson Psychosocial Stage Inventory [D. Rosenthal, R. Gurney, and S. Moore (1981), “From Trust to Intimacy: A New Measure for Examining Erikson's Stages of Psychosocial Development,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence, Vol. 10, pp. 525–537]. Four developmental style groups (Dual High Scorers, High Identity, High Intimacy, and Dual Low Scorers) were formed from these measures. There were no differences between the sexes in their choice of developmental style. Those in the high-identity-high-intimacy and the high-identity-low-intimacy groups were more satisfied with their friendships, which appeared affectively richer. Sex differences showed that while friendship variables were more strongly associated with development for boys, girls viewed their relationships as closer and ascribed more importance to this closeness.     

Prospective associations between friendship adjustment and social strategies: friendship as a context for building social skills

The proposal that friendships provide a context for the development of social skills is widely accepted. Yet little research exists to support this claim. In the present study, children and adolescents (N = 912) were presented with vignettes in which a friend encountered a social stressor and they could help the friend and vignettes in which they encountered a stressor and could seek help from the friend. Social strategies in response to these vignettes were assessed in the fall and spring of the school year. Different indicators of friendship adjustment had unique effects on youths' strategies in response to helping tasks. Whereas having more friends predicted decreases in avoidant or hostile strategies, having high-quality friendships predicted emotionally engaged strategies that involved talking about the problem. Moreover, whereas having more friends predicted increases in relatively disengaged strategies, like distraction and acting like the problem never happened, having high-quality friendships predicted decreases in these strategies. The present study also tested whether youths' strategies in the fall predicted changes in friendship adjustment by the spring. Only strategies which may be seen as major friendship transgressions (i.e., avoiding or blaming the friend when the friend encounters a problem) predicted changes in friendship over time. Collectively, these results provide important new information on the interplay between social competencies and friendship experiences and suggest that friendships may provide a critical venue for the development of important relationship skills.