Blackwell Reference Online

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Friendships – intimate, ongoing relationships involving shared disclosure, sustained interaction, and strong feelings of connection – play a significant role in the human life course. The significance of these interpersonal relationships is heightened during adolescence, a period of life in which young people are particularly socially oriented and in which their self-concepts are especially sensitive to the judgments of others. Consequently, friendships are a major component of adolescent life, in both positive and negative ways. Within sociology, theory and research on adolescent friendships has traditionally had a distinctly negative tone. For the most part, it has focused on the role of friends and peers (similar others who may or may not be friends) in problem behavior and school disorder during adolescence. This tradition stands in stark contrast to the other discipline that has historically paid attention to adolescent friendships, developmental psychology, which has focused most often on the salient role of such friendships in normative social, emotional, and cognitive development during the early life course. In fact, sociologists have virtually introduced the concept of “peer pressure,” named and known in various ways, to popular culture. This concept has certainly long been central to key theoretical traditions (e.g., Sutherland's differential association theory) in criminological ... log in or subscribe to read full text