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For many early adolescents, friendship functions as a centerpiece of daily experience. Early adolescents spend time and interact with their friends in environments that are real, electronic, or virtual. Together they share a range of experiences including achievement-related and social events at school, the affective ups and downs associated with family life, and the multifaceted experiences associated with adjusting to new freedoms and new internal states and desires. The importance of friendship during this period has not been lost on writers and filmmakers. The best known works of fiction about early adolescents typically tell a story about how a person of this age makes his or her way through life in the company of his or her friends. The Harry Potter stories are the best examples of this genre of literature. Millions and millions of readers have been captivated by the stories of the experiences that Harry shares with his friends – Ron and Hermoine – at their school. These stories, and many others, are exemplary in their depictions of the challenges and opportunities associated with friendship for early adolescent boys and girls. The challenges and opportunities posed by friendship in early adolescence have been well recognized by developmental psychologists. Research on friendship has been a mainstay of research on social development for more than a century (Bukowski & Sippola, 2005). This research has been motivated by multiple interests. Three research goals have been especially prominent: (a) to identify what friendship consists of, (b) to assess how friendship affects development and well-being, and (c) to examine the intersection between friendship and risk status. Attention has been devoted to each of these goals. Insofar as one needs to know what one is studying before it can be measured in a way that would reveal its developmental significance, attempts to identify the features of friendship have typically preceded efforts to identify the effects of friendship and its association with risk. Accordingly these three research streams have not run completely in parallel. Instead, research on the features of friendship has preceded research on the general effects of friendship, which, in turn has informed research on friendship and risk. |
