The Importance of Experienced Support and Physical Closeness as Contributors to Friendship Quality for Adolescent Boys and Girls in a Collectivistic and an Individualistic Culture: Do Sex-Differences in Intimacy Levels account for Differences in Friendship Quality?

Abstract

Friendship is very important during adolescence since it provides the social environment necessary for adolescents to develop interpersonal skills such as collaboration, taking different perspectives, and empathy (Buhrmester & Furman, 1986; in Clark & Ayers, 1993; Crosnoe, 2000). In supplement to the Bachelor research of Boersma, Mulder and Okur (2007), who found that the most important contributors to friendship quality, in an individualistic as well as a collectivistic culture, are experienced support and physical closeness, gender-differences in the influence that these two factors have on friendship quality were studied. In previous studies females have been found to be more competent in the skills needed to develop intimate relationships (e.g. Buhrmester, 1998) and to be giving more support to males than other males do (e.g. Aukett et al., 1988; Buhrmester, 1998; Kuttler et al., 1999). Gender-differences in supportive and intimate skills give implications for the way policy-makers, schools, clubs, and all other organizations that deal with youngsters think about separating or mixing male and female adolescents in their daily lives, since males and females could possibly supplement each others’ intimate development. In present research females were expected to be experiencing more support and be physical more intimate than males and therefore they were expected to experience more friendship quality. Regression analysis confirmed these expectations. For females only mediating relationships between gender, experienced support, physical closeness, and friendship quality were found while for males a moderating relationship between gender, physical closeness and friendship quality also existed. This difference can be explained in terms of socialization processes making males less likely to be physical intimate with one another. The implication that these findings have for the separating or mixing of male and female adolescents in their daily lives remains contradictory since it seems that adolescents’ intimacy and sensitivity with same gender friends transfers to relationships with cross-gender friends (e.g. Sullivan, 1953; in Sieffge-Krenke, 1993) and since other factors like reciprocity of friendship are expected to be more important for the development of interpersonal skills than experienced support and physical intimacy in adolescent’ friendship.