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Investigating Friendship Quality: An Exploration of Self-Control and Social Control Theories’ Friendship Hypotheses

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Abstract

While associations with deviant peers are well understood to impact individual development, less is understood about the relationship between friendship quality and delinquency. Two criminological theories—social control theory and self-control theory—are able to offer an explanation for the latter relationship. Social control and self-control theories both premise that delinquents will have largely fractured, weak, and “cold and brittle” friendships. This study investigates how variations in perceptions of friendship quality are related to the delinquency, maternal attachment, school attachment, and self-control levels of both a participant and his/her close friend. To explore these relationships, we use a diverse (14% black; 18% Hispanic; 9% Asian) sample of 2,154 emerging adults within 1,077 friendship pairs (66% female). In each dyad, both members perceived the friendship’s quality and reported personal markers of delinquency, social bonds, and self-control. Several series of multilevel models are estimated that regress each participant’s friendship quality perception onto the participant’s and their friend’s delinquency, attachments, self-control, and demographic characteristics. Results show that delinquents have as intense, or more intense, friendships as non-delinquents. However, low levels of both actor and partner attachments and self-control are independently related to low friendship quality, and this is especially true for self-control. Supplemental analyses demonstrate that the effect of self-control on friendship quality may be reduced when individuals in dyads are delinquent. In conclusion, studies that address friendship quality without including characteristics of multiple members of the friendship are only capturing part of one’s estimate of friendship quality.

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Notes

  1. The reason we only chose the mother and not the father was because approximately 8% of individuals in the sample did not know their father, whereas nearly everyone knew their mother.

  2. Although the social control measures are on z-score scales, the mean values are not true zero because of data imputation. Also, the school attachment measure showed low reliability. To err on the side of caution, all analyses were estimated without the school attachment variable as well. No substantive differences were observed, and the measure was thus used in analyses.

  3. Although all five dimensions of the FQS are designed to be used together in a single measure of friendship quality, we broke the FQS down into five separate dependent variables that measured the five dimensions and ran APIM HLMs identical to the models in Tables 2, 3, 4. While the impact of delinquency was generally consistent with the reported models, a distinct finding emerged for both self-control and social control. First, actor and partner self-control were both significantly associated with less conflict reported by members of the dyadic relationships. Second, higher levels of both actor and partner maternal attachment were significantly associated with higher perceptions that a friend was willing to be helpful.

  4. We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for making this observation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology and Criminology and Law, University of Florida, PO Box 117330, Gainesville, FL, 32611-7330, USA

    John H. Boman IV, Marvin D. Krohn & Chris L. Gibson

  2. Department of Political Science, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA, 30460-8101, USA

    John M. Stogner

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  1. John H. Boman IV
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  2. Marvin D. Krohn
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  3. Chris L. Gibson
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  4. John M. Stogner
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Correspondence to John H. Boman IV.

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Boman, J.H., Krohn, M.D., Gibson, C.L. et al. Investigating Friendship Quality: An Exploration of Self-Control and Social Control Theories’ Friendship Hypotheses. J Youth Adolescence 41, 1526–1540 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-012-9747-x

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