Ideas about romantic relationships have been studied in adolescents. This article extends this study to younger children.
We asked two hundred seventy 5- to 11-year-olds to draw “two children who have a romance” and “two children who
are friends,” and we subsequently interviewed each participant about the characters’ relationships. The drawings were
coded with three scales of Pictorial Assessment of Interpersonal Relationships (PAIR), an instrument by Bombi, Pinto, and
Cannoni. Interviews were categorized by the characters’ age and identity and by the distinguishing features of romance and
friendship: location, intimacy, activity, personal characteristics, and emotions. Scale scores were compared with variance
analyses, whereas the categories frequencies were submitted to chi-square. Results showed that all participants were able to
distinguish the two relationships, even if the descriptions increased in detail with age. Girls provided more information than
boys about romance, but were less inclined to talk about their own romantic experience
