Written by Aida Weheba
When I left home for University in a new city, I had the type of worries that likely filled the minds of many would-be students. However, as I look back on the past couple of years, I’ve come to realise how I’ve grown emotionally, and the role that my friends have played in this. Clearly, many of us can anecdotally attest to the power of friendships in maintaining personal well-being. The question I now have to ask myself, as a budding psychology student, is what does the science say about the power of friendship?
Step in Rebecca Graber, Rhiannon Turner, & Anna Madill, who recruited 409 adolescents to take part in a study that was designed to dig at this issue. Although participants were required to complete a number of measures, the primary focus was on the relationship between friendship quality and psychological resilience. Results showed that a significant positive association between the two variables. What’s more, they found that this association was helped by a constructive coping style and a supportive friendship network.
One major strength of this study that could easily be overlooked is the fact that the participants completed the measures themselves through self-reporting. While this may not sound like a big deal, research on youth resilience often relies on ‘informant reports’ (which sound oddly daunting), peer ratings, and achievement in behavioural domains, rather than asking the participants directly. This can lead to erroneous inferences and increases the likelihood of confounding variables such as popularity and social competence (Bukowski & Adams, 2005). All that being said, self-report measures do bring along with them a variety of limitations; they rely on participants answering honestly and accurately in order to draw valid inferences. Consequently, participants may not have completed the measures entirely accurately if they were looking to conform to social norms or trying to satisfy the experimenter’s expectations for the study, for instance.
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| The findings of Graber et al. (2015) indicate that just one close friendship could significantly bolster psychological resilience |
Despite this limitation, this study presents some interesting implications for programmes that help adolescents foster psychological resilience, particularly within school settings, given the demographic of participants used in the study. Schools could, for example, prioritise existing and emerging supportive adolescent friendships within resilience interventions to promote positive change (Hart & Heaver, 2013). Alternatively, supportive peer friendships might be regularly included within assessments of psychosocial resources by clinicians and educators. These are just some of the ways this research might help bolster current interventions to promote resilience in young people.
However, take all of the words within the last paragraph with a pinch of salt. Why? The study was correlational in design, and hence it is impossible to know if improved resilience causes stronger friendships or whether it’s the other way around. Future research with experimental designs may therefore be useful in this domain. Whatever the case, at a time where socialising is becoming a challenge in itself, I’m going to drop my friends a line anyhow and hope that a by-product of that will be improvements in my resilience!
References
Bukowski, W.
M., & Adams, R. (2005). Peer relationships and psychopathology: Markers,
moderators, mediators, mechanisms , and meanings. Journal of Clinical Child
and Adolescent Psychology, 34(1), 3-10.
Graber, R.,
Turner, R., & Madill, A. (2015). Best friends and better coping:
Facilitating psychological resilience through boys’ and girls’ closest
friendships.
Hart, A.,
& Heaver, B. (2013). Evaluating resilience-based programs for schools using
a systematic consulatative review. Journal of Child and Youth Development, 1(1),
27-53.