Friendship experiences among preschool children: Links with prosocial behavior and aggression.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Friendships vary in how much support, companionship, intimacy and conflict they provide to children. In previous studies, some of these features of children's friendships have been found to predict children's future socio-emotional adjustment. Features of preschool children's friendships, however, have rarely been studied. One goal of this investigation was to devise a reliable measure of friendship features among young children. Another goal was to use this instrument to investigate the relations between friendship experiences and prosocial behavior, overt aggression, and relational aggression. Sociometric nominations, peer nominations of social behavior, teacher ratings of social behavior, and teacher ratings of friendship features were collected for 98 preschool children (52 boys, 46 girls; mean age = 3.91 years) at a university-based laboratory school.
Results provide evidence that teachers can reliably report on friendship features of preschool children (i.e., Support, Exclusivity/Intimacy, Conflict, and Asymmetry) and these features are related to children's social behavior. After controlling for peer acceptance and rejection when necessary: (1) Supportiveness in children's friendships was related to prosocial behavior, (2) Conflict in children's friendships was related to overt aggression, and (3) Exclusivity/intimacy of children's friendships was related to relational aggression. The characteristics of children's friends, especially friends' prosocial behavior and overt aggression, also contributed to the supportiveness and conflictfulness of friendship relationships. Many of the associations described above also held when examined across a one year period. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that having supportive friendships with prosocial peers predicts increases in prosocial behavior while having conflicted friendships with overtly aggressive peers predicts increases in overt aggression.