Adolescent Girls: Transition from Girlfriends to Boyfriends?

Abstract

In this chapter, I shall examine what happens to girls’ friendship groups when adolescent girls start going out with boys, referring to some research which I carried out in West Yorkshire. Rather than emphasising the breakdown of girls’ friendship groups with the onset of girl-boy relationships, as some previous studies have done, I shall stress the positive strategies which the girls I worked with used to resist pressures to drop their girlfriends.