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

The two sets of analyses must be considered together because their findings overlap. For example, the first set sometimes revealed effects of friendship quality or stability that were qualified by interactions with the friends' adjustment, much as a two-way interaction qualifies main effects in a traditional ANOVA. In such cases, the chances of confusion or misinterpretation are reduced when all findings for a single dependent variable are described at the same time.

All the regression analyses had the same form. The criterion in each analysis was one of the eight measures of students' adjustment (see Table 3). In half the analyses, a measure of students' adjustment at Time 2 was the criterion and the corresponding Time 1 measure was the first predictor. In the other half, a measure of students' adjustment at Time 3 was the criterion and the corresponding Time 2 measure was the first predictor. The adjustment measure at the previous time was always entered on the first step to control for the continuity in students' adjustment. The predictor entered on Step 2 was a measure of friendship quality, friendship stability, or friends' adjustment. On later steps, additional measures of friendship and terms for the interaction of variables already in the equation were entered. When measures entered on the second or later steps are significant predictors, it is reasonable to conclude that they partly explain the changes over time in students' adjustment.

The Influences of Friends and Friendships: Findings

Table 4 summarizes the most important findings of the regression analyses. The variable entered on Step 1, students' adjustment at the previous time, was always a significant and strong predictor. These effects illustrate the continuity in adjustment that was noted earlier. The same pattern was evident for the other adjustment measures not listed in Table 4. Because our study was focused on the influences of friends and friendships, Table 4 only provides information on analyses in which a measure of friendship or friends' adjustment was also a significant predictor of students' adjustment.

One analysis provided evidence for the hypothesis that students' adjustment improves after a school transition if they have high-quality, stable friendships. As Table 4 shows, Time 1 friendship quality was a predictor of changes in sociability-leadership from Time 1 to Time 2, but the interaction of Friendship quality x Friendship stability was also a significant predictor. To clarify this interaction, regression coefficients for friendship quality were calculated for students with values of friendship stability at the mean and one standard deviation above and below the mean (Aiken & West, 1991). As Figure 1 suggests, the coefficient for friendship quality was significant only for students whose friendships were high in stability (1 SD above the mean), beta = .32, p

Another analysis provided evidence for the hypothesis that students' adjustment improves over time if they have well-adjusted friends. As Table 4 shows, friends' perceived social competence at Time 2 was a predictor of changes in students' perceived social competence from Time 2 to Time 3. The positive regression coefficient implies that students' perceived social competence increased across the post-transition interval when their friends perceived themselves as more socially competent.