Abstract
Friendship experiences have been shown to be important predictors of adolescents’ loneliness. The current study examined selection and socialization effects of loneliness within reciprocal best friendships, while controlling for friendship quality. Analyses were conducted on a sample of 884 adolescents (42.08% boys), making up 442 dyads, who were on average 13.51 years old (SD = 1.37). Adolescents completed the peer-related loneliness subscale of the Loneliness and Aloneness Scale for Children and Adolescents as well as the Friendship Qualities Scale. A longitudinal actor-partner interdependence model, which accounts for the interdependencies in the data of best friends, suggested the presence of a selection effect for loneliness but no socialization effect. This finding within best friendships contrasts with studies on friendship networks where both selection and socialization were established.
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Funding
This study was funded by Research Foundation—Flanders (Grant G.0923.12 Ph.D. fellowship to Margot Bastin).
Author Contributions
A.S. analysed the data and designed and wrote the paper. M.B. designed and executed the study as well as collaborated in writing the paper. L.G. and P.B. collaborated with the design and writing of the paper.
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The study was approved by the institutional review board at KU Leuven (S55360). All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.
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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
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Spithoven, A.W.M., Bastin, M., Bijttebier, P. et al. Lonely Adolescents and Their Best Friend: An Examination of Loneliness and Friendship Quality in Best Friendship Dyads. J Child Fam Stud 27, 3598–3605 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-018-1183-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-018-1183-4