Influences of friends and friendships on adjustment to junior high school

Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, Jan 1999 by Berndt, Thomas J, Hawkins, Jacquelyn A, Jiao, Ziyi

To explore influences of friends and friendships on adjustment to junior high school, 101 students were interviewed about their friendships in the spring of sixth grade and again in the fall and spring of seventh grade. Adjustment was judged from self-reports, peer nominations, teacher ratings, and school records. Sociability and leadership increased across the transition if students had high-quality friendships in 6th grade that were mostly stable across the transition. Behavior problems increased if students had stable friendships with sixth-grade friends high in behavioral problems. Sensitivity-isolation of students with sensitive-isolated friends increased across the transition unless they had high-quality, stable friendships. Separate and interactive effects of friendships and friends' characteristics were discussed.

When students move from elementary school to junior high school, they typically join a new peer group, have new teachers, and encounter a more complex social organization. Many researchers have assumed that these changes in the school environment make the junior high transition stressful for students (e.g., Basic Behavioral Sciences Task Force of the National Advisory Mental Health Council, 1996). However, students differ greatly in their adaptation to junior high, and the causes of these individual differences are poorly understood.

Our study was designed to explore the influences of friends and friendships on students' adjustment to junior high school. Current models for understanding the significance of friendships suggested two general hypotheses (Berndt, 1996b; Hartup, 1996). First, the quality and the stability of students' friendships affect their adjustment to junior high. Second, students' adjustment to junior high is influenced by the adjustment of their friends. Besides testing these hypotheses, the study provides evidence concerning the effects of the junior high transition on students' adjustment.

Mixed Evidence on the Junior High Transition

Our study, like most previous studies, focused on the move from sixth grade in elementary school to seventh grade in junior high school. Beginning in the 1980s, many school districts dropped the label junior high and began to refer to the level following elementary school as middle school. Often, the change in labels coincided with the transfer of sixth grade from elementary school to the new middle school. Then students made a school transition between the fifth and sixth grades. The transition to middle school for sixth grade and to junior high school for seventh grade seem to have similar effects (Nottelmann, 1987). Therefore, many researchers make no distinction between them (e.g., Seidman, Allen, Aber, Mitchell, & Feinman, 1994), describing both as early-adolescent school transitions.

The effects of early-adolescent school transitions were first examined more than two decades ago, when data from a cross-sectional study suggested that students' self-esteem decreases after they move to junior high (Simmons, Rosenberg, & Rosenberg, 1973). In a later longitudinal study, a decrease in self-esteem across the junior high transition was found only for girls, not for boys (Simmons & Blyth, 1987). However, this sex difference has not been replicated in other longitudinal studies. Some researchers reported that the self-esteem of boys and girls decreased significantly across the transition to junior high (Seidman et al., 1994; Wigfield, Eccles, Mac Iver, Reuman, & Midgley, 1991). Other researchers reported that boys' and girls' self-esteem either changed little or increased across the transition (Crockett, Petersen, Graber, Schulenberg, & Ebata, 1989; Hirsch & Rapkin, 1987; Nottelmann, 1987; Proctor & Choi, 1994).

The evidence is equally mixed for measures of students' social and academic self-concepts. In one study (Wigfield et al., 1991), students perceived their social ability as lower after they entered junior high. In other studies (Nottelmann, 1987; Proctor & Choi, 1994), students' perceived social competence either did not change or increased across the transition. Similarly, although some researchers have argued that students' perceptions of their scholastic ability decrease across the junior high transition (e.g., Anderman & Maehr, 1994), the available data are inconsistent. In studies with measures of perceived cognitive competence, the mean scores of students either did not change or increased across the transition (Harter, Whitesell, & Kowalski, 1992; Nottelmann, 1987; Proctor & Choi,1994).

A few researchers have argued that a school transition disrupts students' friendship groups (Eccles et al., 1993; Entwistle, 1990). In what apparently is the only previous study to test this hypothesis (Hirsch & Rapkin, 1987; see Hirsch & DuBois, 1989), students perceived their friendships at least as positively after entering junior high as before. In addition, the stability of students' friendships was not greatly affected by the transition. Most seventh graders said that their best friend from elementary school was still their best friend or still a close friend.