Chapter 8: Friends and Peers Flashcards
Peers
Other people who all share a certain salient characteristic or status.
Peer groups provide social support needed in development of self-identity and self-esteem.
Friends
People who have developed a valued, mutual relationship which provides companionship, emotional and personal support.
Intimacy
Degree to which two people share personal knowledge, thoughts, feelings.
Peer pressure
Common term for social effects from other adolescents.
Friends’ influence
Pressure to think and act like one’s friends.
More accurate term because friends have more influence over behaviour than peers do.
Selective association
Principle that most people tend to choose friends who are similar to themselves.
Informational support
Between friends, advice and guidance in solving personal problems.
Instrumental support
Between friends, help with various tasks (ex. homework).
Companionship support
Between friends, reliance on each other as companions in social activities.
Esteem support
Providing congratulations for success; encouragement or consolation for failure.
Cliques
Small groups of friends who know each other well, do things together, and form a cohesive social group.
Crowds
Large, less personal, reputation-based groups of adolescents.
Five major types: elites, athletes, academics, deviants, others.
Relational aggression
Form of nonphysical aggression that harms others by damaging social relationships, ex. gossip, spreading rumours, social exclusion.
Social cognition
Understanding how groups work.
Social competence
Using social skills to facilitate good social interactions.
Social skills
Skills for successfully handling social relations and getting along well with others.
Emotional regulation
Managing anger or aggression.
Sociometry
Method for assessing popularity/unpopularity by having students rate the social status of other students.
Several types: popular, rejected, neglected, controversial.
Popular adolescents
Adolescents with many positive ratings, often nominated as best friend, rarely disliked.
- high in sociability, social dominance, low levels of aggression
Rejected adolescents
Adolescents who are actively disliked and avoided by their peers.
- excessively aggressive, disruptive, quarrelsome
Neglected adolescents
Adolescents who have few or no friends and are largely unnoticed by their peers.
- low self-esteem, loneliness, depression, alcohol abuse
Controversial adolescents
Adolescents who are aggressive but also posses social skills, so they evoke strong emotions both positive and negative from their peers.
Social information processing
The interpretation of others’ behaviour and intentions in a social interaction.
Having social skills means giving others the benefit of the doubt and avoiding tendency to interpret their actions as hostile.
Bullying
Aggressive assertion of power by one person over another. Victims tend to be socially isolated, have poor social skills, and avoided/rejected by peers.
Three components:
- aggression (physical or verbal)
- repetition (occurs repeatedly over time)
- Power imbalance (the bully has higher peer status than the victim)
Youth culture
Culture of young people as a whole, characterized by values of hedonism (pleasure seeking) and irresponsibility.
Subterranean values
Values such as hedonism, excitement and adventure, asserted by sociologists to be the basis of youth culture.
Style
The distinguishing features of youth culture, including image, demeanour and argot.
Image
In Brake’s description of the characteristics of youth culture, refers to dress, hairstyle, jewellery, and other aspects of appearance.
Demeanor
In Brake’s description of the characteristics of youth culture, refers to distinctive forms of gesture, gait, posture.
Argot
In Brake’s description of the characteristics of youth culture, refers to a certain vocabulary and way of speaking.
Slang
An informal vocabulary and grammar that differs from the native language.
Postfigurative cultures
In traditional cultures, parents pass on knowledge, skills, values to children.
Rate of technological change is slow.
Configurative cultures
Those in which the skills that are important to the economy change from generation to generation. Young people learn from both their parents and other young people.
Preconfigurative cultures
Direction of learning is from the young people to their parents. Mead believed this would occur when technological change occurs rapidly.
Dormitory
In some traditional cultures, a dwelling in which the community’s adolescents sleep and spend their leisure time.
Men’s house
In some traditional cultures, a dormitory where adolescent boys sleep and hang out along with adult men who are widowed or divorced.
