Discuss gender differences in friendship quality in adolescence

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answer: In adolescence, emotional closeness is more common between girls than boys. Girls frequently get together to “just talk,” and their interactions contain more self-disclosure and mutually supportive statements. In contrast, boys more often gather for an activity—usually sports and competitive games. Boys’ discussions usually focus on successes in sports and school and involve more competition and conflict. Because of gender-role expectations, girls’ friendships typically focus on communal concerns, boys’ on achievement and status. Boys do form close friendship ties, but the quality of their friendships is more variable. When ethnically diverse boys from low-income families were asked to describe their friendships, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanics mentioned closeness, mutual support, and self-disclosure more often than their white counterparts. But as ethnic minority boys transitioned from mid- to late adolescence, many reported a decline in friendship closeness. Their remarks revealed that masculine stereotypes—to be tough and unemotional—interfered with these bonds. But perhaps because of cultural valuing of emotional expressiveness between male friends, Hispanic boys were more likely than others to resist conforming to gender stereotypes. Such resistance, by permitting boys to benefit from the supportiveness of intimate friends, is consistently related to better adjustment. Friendship closeness, however, can have costs. When friends focus on deeper thoughts and feelings, they tend to coruminate, or repeatedly mull over problems and negative emotions, with girls doing so more than boys. Corumination, while contributing to high friendship quality, also triggers anxiety and depression—symptoms more common in girls. And when conflict arises between intimate friends, more potential exists for one party to harm the other through relational aggression—for example, by divulging sensitive personal information to outsiders. Partly for these reasons, girls’ closest same-sex friendships tend to be of shorter duration than boys’.