Chapter 8 - Friends and Peers Flashcards
8.1 Summarize the shift in adolescence in the balance between friendships and family relationships in developed countries.
Friends become increasingly important during adolescence. The amount of time spent with friends increases (and time spent with family decreases), and friends become increasingly significant as confidants and as sources of personal advice and emotional support. Although peers are also important to young people in traditional cultures, the influence of peers is enhanced in developed countries because school brings peers together for many hours each day, away from their parents.
8.2 Explain how the balance between friendships and family relationships is distinctive in developing countries.
Adolescents in developing countries, like those in developed countries, shift toward more time with friends and less time with family, but adolescents in developing countries often work alongside their parents in fields or factories. Traditional cultures are more likely to have gender differences in adolescents’ relationships with peers and family. Specifically, in traditional cultures, involvement with peers and friends tends to be much greater for boys than for girls. In addition, the social and emotional balance between friends and family remains tilted more toward family than it does for adolescents in the West.
8.3 Explain why friends are the sources of more intense emotions than parents are.
In a close friend adolescents find someone who mirrors their own emotions. In addition, adolescents feel free and open with friends in a way they rarely do with parents. However, friends are also the source of strong negative emotions, as conflicts and misunderstandings provoke anger, sadness, and anxiety.
8.4 Describe the role that intimacy plays in adolescents’ friendships and how it changes with age.
A key change in friendships from preadolescence to adolescence is the increased importance of intimacy, with a focus on qualities such as trust and loyalty and an increased amount of time together spent in conversation about significant issues rather than on shared activities.
8.5 Connect adolescents’ cognitive development to the rising importance of intimacy in friendship and explain why intimacy is more central to girls’ friendships.
Thinking becomes more abstract and complex during adolescence, which influences adolescents’ social cognition. Greater ability for abstract thinking makes it possible for adolescents to think about and talk about more abstract qualities in their relationships—affection, loyalty, and trust, for example. Girls spend more time than boys talking to their friends, and they are more likely than boys to say they trust and feel close to their friends. In contrast, boys are more likely to emphasize shared activities as the basis of friendship, such as sports or hobbies.
8.6 Identify the ways friendships change from adolescence to emerging adulthood.
Intimacy is even more important to friendships in emerging adulthood than it is in adolescence. Emerging adults are also more likely than adolescents to have other-sex friends. Sometimes, friendships with other-sex friends include sexual involvement, but this is a frequent source of misunderstandings.
8.7 Identify the similarities that draw adolescents together into friendships.
The most important basis for friendships in adolescence is similarity, particularly in ethnicity, educational orientation, media and leisure preferences, and participation in risk behavior.
8.8 Summarize the research on friends’ influence on risk behavior, and explain why “influence” is difficult to determine.
Although peer pressure is often used as a negative term to describe how adolescent friends encourage each other to participate in risk behavior, studies indicate that the extent of this influence may be exaggerated because of selective association and that adolescent friends may influence each other against risk behavior as well as toward it. Friends also have a variety of positive influences on one another.
8.9 Name the different ways adolescent friends support each other and how that support influences their development.
Types of friend support in adolescence include informational, instrumental, companionship, and esteem. Informational support is advice and guidance in solving personal problems, such as those involving friends, romantic relationships, parents, or school. Instrumental support is help with tasks of various kinds. Companionship support is being able to rely on each other as companions in social activities. Esteem support is the support adolescent friends provide by congratulating their friends when they succeed and encouraging them or consoling them when they fail. According to longitudinal studies, friends’ support can lead to less depression and higher academic performance, but also to participation in risk behavior.
8.10 Distinguish between cliques and crowds and describe their separate functions.
Cliques are small groups of close friends who know each other well, do things together, and form a regular social group. Crowds are larger, reputation-based groups of adolescents who are not necessarily friends and do not necessarily spend much time together. Crowds mainly serve the function of helping adolescents to locate themselves and others within the secondary school social structure.
8.11 Explain why sarcasm and ridicule are common in adolescent cliques, and give examples of cultural variations.
Sarcasm and ridicule are common in adolescent cliques, to establish a dominance hierarchy and to enforce conformity to clique norms. In cultures as diverse as the Mbuti pygmies of the 20th century and Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, adolescents have served the community role of enforcing social norms by subjecting adults who violate them to public ridicule.
8.12 Define relational aggression, and explain why it is more common among girls in adolescence.
Relational aggression includes sarcasm and ridicule as well as gossiping, spreading rumors, snubbing, and excluding others from the clique. It is especially common among adolescent girls, evidently because more direct forms of disagreement and conflict are prohibited in the female gender role.
8.13 Describe how the functions and importance of crowds change during the course of adolescence and into emerging adulthood.
Crowds help adolescents address identity issues and make sense of the school social world and find a place in it. Crowds become more diverse from early adolescence to mid-adolescence, but diminish in importance by late adolescence as adolescents develop their identities and are more confident of their place in the peer social world. Emerging adults enter social worlds in work and leisure that are more diverse in age, and consequently crowd membershiip is no longer relevant.
8.14 Outline the various cultural forms crowds can take.
For minority adolescents as with White adolescents, crowds serve as reference groups and as a way to establish a status hierarchy. In high schools with multiethnic populations, however, adolescents tend to see fewer crowd distinctions in other ethnic groups than they do in their own. Although crowds as found in American schools do not really exist in traditional cultures, many traditional cultures do have a distinct social group of young people The age-graded school setting of Western societies lends itself to the development of reputation-based crowds as a way of defining and organizing a social structure. Traditional cultures sometimes have a version of a peer crowd, with a separate dormitory where adolescents hang out, relax, and engage in sexual play.
8.15 Explain how popularity in adolescence is measured, and identify the main characteristics that are sources of popularity.
Popularity in adolescence is measured through sociometry, which involves having students rate the social status of other students. Sociometric research has revealed that the most important determinant of popularity and unpopularity in adolescence is social skills. Other qualities related to popularity are intelligence and physical attractiveness.
