The Importance of Friendship Essay

Friendship is an essential part of life to everyone. To me, I interact with my friends closely everyday, we chat, we play around, and we work together on homework. For teenagers like us, we like to interact with friends, with people at our age. Without friends, we won’t be able to do anything. We take care of each other, we tell each other everything, and sometimes they are more important than our parents.

When it comes to investigating friendship, one question that has been raised is ‘what is the role of friendship in the life of a 13 year old?’’. Several sources of data include ethnographic notes taken whilst spending time with a group of friends during school lunch breaks and diary/blog entries etc. Firstly, in this case the researcher would need to carefully consider the strengths and weaknesses of each type of data, for example, when looking at a blog the information/data available is likely to be information that the author wants to share with a wider audience whereas a diary entry is more private. In this case, both documents

As they progress and go onto the next stage they put more importance on loyalty and commitment to each other. The third stage, however the importance is with parallel interests and comparable values in attitudes. This shows that as the children get older their friendships become more intricate.

In contrast Corsaro emphasised in what friendship means in particular places at particular times and how children communicate each other in real life conditions in their natural environments. Bigelow and La Gaipa used the “content analysis” for they studies. They took a sample of 480 formal interviews from 8 schools (30 boys and 30 girls from each school, between the ages of six and fourteen) in written, text format with questions concerning the nature of the friendship between them and their best friend of the same sex, about what they felt were important on these relationships, about what they expected from them and what were the differences between their best friends and other friends and acquaintances.

Their impact starts at an early age and increases through the adolescent years. It is common, solid and essential for teenagers to have and depend on companions as they grow and develop. Friends can be positive influences and supportive. They can offer one another some assistance with developing new aptitudes, or empower enthusiasm for a variety of activities such as homework, projects, sports, etc. Then again, having friends can have a negative impact.

Pastime: 48 Shaz: “...we just watch films and go out...” (See Appendix B for a full sample quote)

Friendship means different things to different people in different cultures. Friendship is also different from other kinds of relationship such as love, family and professional. The influential power on people’s behaviour, style, ideas and life is dominant and remarkable and therefore worthwhile for scientific investigation. This essay will compare and contrast the academic research of three dominant and pioneer scientists on the development psychology discipline and especially in the field of children’s expectations and children’s understanding of friendship. It will

Often times women’s studies are overshadowed by topics pertaining to other matters. Because of this, Steve Duck of University of Iowa calls women’s studies “understudied relationships”. In his book, Under-Studied Relationships: Off the Beaten Track, Steve delves into the complicated world that is friendship between women. He reveals that even the best of friendships, more often than not, will dissolve due to geographical distance, especially during the transition from high school to college. However, Duck claims that this occurrence is more detrimental to male friendships than female friendships. According to Duck, “…men’s inability to maintain distal friends may be due to a lack of awareness about and skills to utilize effective strategies that maintain a [friendship]” (184). This argument implies that men simply do not put as much emotional value into friendships as women do. While distance may seem challenging for women to overcome, they put more effort into preserving their friendship. Duck further instills this concept by explaining that “women’s same-sex friendships tend to be based more on intimate and emotional discussions than men’s…” (186). Men, Duck argues, lack the depth in their friendships that women possess and for this reason have difficulty sustaining a friendship that is met with the strain of distance.

“‘...a misunderstanding of the very notion of friendship in an age when ‘friend’ is used as a verb...the authenticity of one’s relationships has an enormous impact on one’s health and well-being… ‘It’s easier to say what friendship is not and, foremost, it is not instrumental.’” Friendship in this day and age is automatic or online. Friendship should not be unauthentic in a way where it can impact a person’s well-being or health. The connection between two friends needs to be personal and not through a phone or tablet screen. In the 21st century, the word ‘friend’ is being used as a verb and not as a compliment or label.

Critical thinking note: Davis, K. (2012). Friendship 2.0: Adolescents’ experiences of belonging and self-disclosure online. Journal of Adolescence, 35(6), 1527–1536.

Differences in childhoods can impact individual’s communication with each other in relationships. At a young age, children tend to play with other children that seem to be of the same gender as them. Both groups of genders have different ways of building a friendship. Tannen says that, “Little girls create and maintain friendships by exchanging secrets” (276). It is important to girls to share secretive things to get closer to one another and to get a mutual understanding. Unlike boys whose bonds are, “based less on talking, more on doing things together” (Tannen 276). Boys do not talk a lot unless the need to prove something. While girls are comfortable about talking about their feelings, boys feel uncomfortable because it is not something they discuss much.

Peer relationships are some of the most important interactions we have in our childhood. According to lecture (5/7/2015), these relationships help to build our social skills as well our social competence, creating a social acceptance amongst our peers. Our textbook (pg. 321) explains that peer relationships promote both physical and cognitive development. Once the child enters the preschool age they begin to differentiate friends from peers. A peer is simply an acquaintance, the child plays with them due to accessibility and similar background or social standing; however, a friend is someone with shared interests and associated with positive experiences. During this study into peer relationships in early and middle childhood, I interviewed two young girls. Kayla is 11 years old and Adison is 4 years old. While some of their views on friendship and peer interactions are similar, most of their views are worlds apart.

This article seeks to empirically measure the degree to which peer groups, specifically friendship groups, exert a normative influence on some aspects of gender identity in adolescents. This theory had not been tested empirically, although the authors cite previous studies to this effect on gender-typical behaviours of younger children and on the significant impact of peers on other areas of adolescent social development. In order to measure adolescents’ evolving understanding of gender identity, the researchers employed longitudinal social network analysis after surveying a diverse body of students. Furthermore, this particular method was utilised to discern whether adolescents tend to emulate the norms of their peers or whether friends are

Children used to actually talk to their real life friends. For today’s teenagers and preteens, the give and take of friendship seems to be conducted increasingly in the abbreviated snatches of cell phones texts, or through social networking sites like Face book. The question on researcher’s minds is whether the quality of their interactions is being diminished without the intimacy and emotional give and take of regular, extended face-to face time. The ease of electronic communication may be making teens less interested in face-to-face conversations, which lead to bad consequences. People who study relationships believe that good friendships that we develop as a child show us how to have healthy and lasting adult relationships. (4)

In life there are many changes that can cause a true friendship to go wary such as marriage, divorce, birth of children, new careers, and sickness. However, through each of those events the two must remember to keep the intimacy, the letting down of emotional barriers and the expression of innermost thoughts and feelings, “that which makes friendships thrive must be an enjoyable one” and to “always interact” (Karbo 3). Although psychologists continue to research the formation of friendships the great philosopher Aristotle knew exactly how friendships formed and how the lasted.