Adolescents' relationships with their friends

Friendship is a central experience in adolescents' lives and in this dissertation I describe the dimensions of that relationship. To do this, I address three questions: (1) What are the characteristics of adolescent friendship?; (2) How do adolescents see friendship as important in their lives?; and (3) What is the impact of a normative view of friendship, based on female relationships, on both male and female adolescents' experience of friendship?; I focus in this dissertation on the friendship narratives told by twenty four adolescents in an interview setting. These twelve young women and twelve young men described a variety of important friendships in their lives and their stories are the data for this study. The four analytic strategies I use, methods which are both qualitative and feminist in nature, are ways in which I pay attention to the edges of my experience, the questions which I bring, and to the edges of the experiences of the adolescents in this study, the issues with which they are struggling.; In this work I highlight the ways in which male and female adolescents experience friendship and the differences which that relationship may hold for them. Their experiences of friendship are joined, for them, to issues around identity such that inquiry about relationship is not separated from questions of identity development. In this analysis I describe two relational voices, connection and equality, which I argue can be heard in both male and female adolescents' stories of friendship. I then illustrate how these voices are heard and integrated in similar as well as different fashions for the young men and young women in this study as they seek answers to their questions about identity and about the nature of relationships.; Developing a view of friendship which is not premised on the assumption that females necessarily have better friendships than males has meant that I have worked to describe a vision of good relationship which incorporates the important friendship experiences of both young men and young women.