Friendship Network Characteristics, Interaction Context Structure, and Friendship Dynamics among Adolescents

Abstract

While most previous studies focus on the effect of adolescents' characteristics on the friendship network & its structure, this study argues that both friendship network characteristics & the interaction context structure have significant effects on adolescents' friendship dynamics. It examines how the interaction context structure of friendship influences the effect of network characteristics on friendship dynamics. In this study, friendship network data from the 1996-1998 Panel Study of Taipei Youths is used to examine whether the friendship attributes & behavioural similarities of adolescents influence friendship changes & whether these effects vary across interaction contexts in terms of class size & class type to increase understanding of how adolescents' friendships evolve in a two-level conceptual framework. A two-stage cluster analysis is applied to characterize friends' change types & a two-level ordinal logit regression is utilized to investigate the research hypotheses. The results show that adolescents' friendship changes are dynamic rather than stable. The distribution of three ordinal types of friendship change varies by the interaction contexts & is influenced by class size or class type. Also, while the effect of friendship attribute similarity on friendship change is not significant, the effect of friendship behavioural similarity is somewhat prominent & is partially influenced by the interaction contexts as well. The findings indicate that friendship network characteristics & interaction context structure do have an influence on friendship dynamics among adolescents in Taiwan