Do you like me as much as I like you? Friendship reciprocity and its effects on school outcomes among adolescents

Abstract

Social scientists have long suspected that friendship dyads are not always reciprocated and those that are reciprocated are likely to be more intimate. Close friendships may provide youth with an environment conducive to healthy development and educational outcomes. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a nationally representative dataset of youth, we examine how attributes of respondents and their friends affect the odds of reciprocity between adolescents. Asian Americans and females are the most likely to have reciprocated friendships. Interracial friendships are less likely to be reciprocated than intraracial friendships. Further, adolescents with reciprocated friendships report higher levels of school belonging. Finally, reciprocity and school belonging both exert independent effects on academic performance. Friendship reciprocity is an important indicator of social support above and beyond the numbers of friends reported by youth.

Introduction

Friendships between two individuals are commonly assumed to be reciprocal in nature. When I say someone is “my friend,” the implication is that this person also thinks of me as a friend. In general, reciprocity is one of the expectations about affective relations (e.g. Laursen, 1993). However, not all friendships are created equal, and certainly not all friendships are reciprocal by default. Furthermore, it is also reasonable to think that relationships that are reciprocated are substantially different from those that are not (Hartup, 1996). For example, in James Coleman’s seminal essay about social capital, one important feature of social capital is the reciprocity of expectations and norms (Coleman, 1988); similarly, friendships that are reciprocated are likely to be more emotionally supportive as well as a superior resource compared to friendships that are not reciprocal. If Anne and Bonnie both consider each other best friends, then there exists a set of mutually agreed upon norms and expectations between Bonnie and Anne. If David considers John to be one of his closest friends, but John does not consider David to be one of his closest friends, then there is an imbalance of power between the two individuals, and David cannot rely on John for psycho-social support or as a social capital resource in the same way that Anne and Bonnie can rely on one another for emotional support or information gathering. The social capital that exists between Anne and Bonnie is no doubt stronger than that which exists between David and John whether or not any of them are aware of the status of reciprocity embedded in their relationships. Despite the apparent importance of the concept of reciprocity among friends, there is no extensive research linking individual and structural differences to differences in friendship reciprocity.

Our research focuses on friendship choices among schoolmates. Studying friendship reciprocity for adolescents in schools is of special interest because we are able to capture much of their social universe (Moody, 1999). This simplified setting allows us to study the general properties of affective relations. The majority of the relational choices adolescents make arguably occur among schoolmates; therefore we believe we capture the majority of the friends adolescents are likely to select. Similar analyses would be difficult to construct for adults because networks become more diverse and are less likely to be primarily located in a single setting. Certainly from childhood to adolescence, friends take center stage in the social world of the adolescent (Coleman, 1961).

The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (hereafter Add Health) is the first nationally representative dataset that allows us to examine questions about friendship and reciprocity during adolescence. Unlike the majority of previous research on friendships, we do not have to rely on perceived reciprocity. In Add Health, information is supplied by both individuals—respondent and best friend; thus our analyses utilize actual rather than assumed friendship reciprocity.

Since friendships do not occur in a vacuum, but rather are embedded in multiple contexts, this study analyzes friendship reciprocity by taking into account how some contexts affect the likelihood of friendship reciprocity. The three contexts we consider are the individual, the relational, and the school. The individual characteristics that might be related to the likelihood of having a reciprocal friendship are the socioeconomic background of the young, his/her gender, as well as the individual’s race. For the relational aspect, we focus on the interracial/intraracial nature of the friendship, and for the context, we focus on the school. This does not imply that other aspects might not be relevant when studying reciprocity, however, these have been typically used for the study of friendship. Below we describe how all these aspects might be related to whether a friendship is reciprocated.

In the second part of article we analyze how friendship reciprocity is related to the adolescent’s well-being at school. We do this in two steps, first, we investigate the relationship between reciprocity and the sense of school belonging of the respondent; then we examine how these two (i.e. having a reciprocated friendship and the perception of school belonging) are independently related to the academic achievement of the students. We argue that reciprocal friendships are a relevant resource for improved school outcomes for the youth.