THE YOUNG PEOPLE'S Leisure and Lifestyles project based in the Department of Education at the University of Aberdeen has just completed a seven-year study. One of the many topics covered by the research team was that of friendships and their importance to adolescents.
ALTHOUGH relationships with parents determine in large measure our longer-term preferences, attitudes and values, during adolescence it is often relationships with friends that cause most concern and which pre- occupy the thoughts of young people as they grow up.
Friendships are based on a completely different set of structural relationships to those with parents. They are more symmetrical and involve sharing and exchange. Friendships are important to young children but there is a change at the beginning of adolescence -- a move to intimacy that includes the development of a more exclusive focus, a willingness to talk about oneself and to share problems and advice. Friends tell one another just about everything that is going on in each other's lives... Friends literally reason together in order to organise experience and to define themselves as persons.
The role of friendships
In adolescence friendships normally exist within the larger social structure of peer relationships. In this larger social setting each adolescent has a particular role to play and is usually aware of their own status within the group. Close friendships are not independent of such status. Popular or successful youngsters stick together. Those who are 'in' do not mix as frequently with those on the periphery of what is acceptable to the group. Whereas the standards and styles set by the peer group can set highly influential markers around acceptable and unacceptable behaviours for young people, it is in individual friendships that young people find support and security, negotiate their emotional independence, exchange information, put beliefs and feelings into words and develop a new and different perspective of themselves.
Data from the YPLL project indicates that young men and young women use and view friendships in quite different ways. For instance, as far as young women are concerned, we can trace the development of friendships through an early adolescent period when emotional commitments are minimal and the focus of friendship is common activities, a period in mid-adolescence when young women become most anxious about being rejected or excluded from a same-sex friendship. There is strong emphasis on loyalty and support at this stage:
'...People should remember that you need attention too, and not ignore you and sneak away from you. People who sneak away from you cannot really be your friends in the first place. Sometimes friends gang up on you. So you have to make another friend in another class. That is not pleasant. I should know...'
Friendships become easier for young women in later adolescence as they develop a clearer sense of self identity. Young women of this age show a high regard for each other's individuality and a greater ability to tolerate differences. Young men's friendships rarely achieve the depth of intimacy of young women's. Larger peer groups - the boys' or 'the lads' - often appear more important to them than individual friendships. Young men in middle adolescence describe their friends to researchers in the YPLL team in terms similar to those used by pre-adolescent girls - failing to see emotional support, closeness or security as important qualities of a friendship.
Apart from these general trends, the YPLL data also reveals interesting social class differences between youngsters. Young people from working- class backgrounds, for instance, are more likely to spend time with a boy/girlfriend whereas young people from G middle-class backgrounds continue to move around in mixed sex groups for a longer period, perhaps anticipating an extended period of dependence on parents as they head for further or higher education.
The role of the peer group
Peers and friends are not the same thing. Peer groups appear to have a dynamic role, the function and influence of which shifts across adolescence. The adolescent uses the peer group to evaluate the perspectives of others, while developing his or her own values and attitudes.
Style of dress, hairstyles, musical interests, speech and language use, leisure activities, and values are among the characteristics that teenagers appear to learn, in part, by watching and comparing themselves to others in their group. Further, teenagers learn methods of handling social relationships by observing and imitating peers. The influence of the peer group appears to be particularly marked where parental influence is not strong.
Of course, being liked, accepted and defining one's role within a social group are important features of life at any age, but because peers play such an important role in the lives of adolescents, social acceptance is an urgent concern for most young people. Young people in the YPLL study were asked to identify from a list which items they felt influenced popularity and unpopularity amongst friends. From this question we discovered that young men are more likely to regard being like their friends in behaviour and appearance and physical attributes as important, whereas young women are more likely to value qualities in the personality of their friends, like honesty, cheerfulness and so on. The importance attached to attractiveness declines throughout the adolescent years . Lastly, there are class- based differences. For example, amongst both boys and girls, more importance is attached to qualities such as 'a good personality' and 'being oneself' by young people from middle- class backgrounds.
These findings highlight the importance of peer pressures in adolescence. The peer group gives out clear signals to its members both about style and about fundamental values and perspectives. Conformity to the group is the price that has to be paid for approval and acceptance by peers.
Alone and lonely
One set of findings from the YPLL project included evidence of a concern with personal loneliness and the absence of confidants among a substantial number of adolescents. Though adolescence is generally a time of intense sociability, it can also often be a time of intense loneliness. Being with peers and friends does not necessarily solve this feeling of loneliness. Adolescents are notorious for their frequent shifts in mood, frequent periods of rumination over relationships and identity, and time spent alone.
In the YPLL survey a sixth of adolescents reported spending a lot of spare time on their own. This issue was followed up in qualitative interviews with a panel of young people, for while we cannot make a simple equation between aloneness and the experience of social and psychological difficulty, young people do seem to need to interact with friends in resolving some of their conflicts. We found clear differences between the ways in which boys and girls cope with problems. For instance, the panel members in the YPLL study were asked to respond to a number of statements about what they would do if they had a problem. Confiding in a friend when unhappy or worried tended to be something which young women rather than young men were inclined to do.
The more negative and distressing aspects of friendship are rarely examined in the literature on adolescence. By way of exploring this neglected area members of the YPLL panel group were invited to talk about problems experienced with friends. Such discussions highlighted the significance of arguments and broken friendships. Asked about what might spoil a friendship, the breaking of a confidence and (for boys) 'stealing' another person's girlfriend were considered particularly disloyal. Young people are not alone in having problems with friendships, but the psycho-social issues that confront adolescents make it more certain that such difficulties are likely to be of concern to them. Adolescents can be highly egocentric.
They sometimes find it difficult to see other people's point of view and to interpret other people's behaviour. They can be touchy and hypersensitive to rejection, and their social skills are, as yet, underdeveloped.
Equally, at times, adolescents feel the need to 'escape' and to be on their own. The YPLL panel study asked young people: Where do you go and what do you do if you just want to be alone to think?' The answers highlighted young people's desire for a private place of their own. The overwhelming response was to escape to the bedroom:
'In my room - close the door, ask not to be disturbed, and put on some soothing music, sit on my bed, relaxed, and think...'
Another young person disclosed:
'I stay in my room and if I'm feeling troubled about something I write it out on paper and that helps me to work things out.'
Others went out:
"I go down to the swing park and swing slowly on a swing."
Other places frequently mentioned were walks in parks or woods. A number of young men mentioned going off on their bikes to get away from it all, and amongst older adolescents driving around or driving out of town and parking to view the scenery were popular 'escape' mechanisms.
As the individual adolescent seeks to grow more independent of the family, peer groups and friends become important points of reference. They provide social contexts for shaping the day- to- day behaviour of adolescents, and encourage conformity to norms and values. Despite much popular mythology about 'the generation gap', such standards are startlingly similar to parental values, though the similarities are masked by different youth styles or expressions. Such groupings clearly have a developmental potential in enabling young people to make the social adjustments necessary for them to operate in adult society.
Educationalists concerned with young people have begun to pay much more attention to the concept of 'peer education'--for example, in relation to smoking, drug or HIV education programmes (eg Smokebusters or Fast Forward in Scotland). How much attention do these programmes pay to the real dynamics of peer group pressures as they ebb and flow across adolescence?
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