The costs and benefits of being a social butterfly: Interpersonal and intrapersonal correlates of individuals with friends across multiple cliques
Open Access
- Author:
- Ebrahimi, Nassim
- Graduate Program:
- Psychology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- September 30, 2005
- Committee Members:
- Jeffrey G Parker, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Karen Gasper, Committee Member
Janet Swim, Committee Member
Scott David Gest, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Peer relationships
social butterfly
cliques
adolescents
adolescence
loneliness
interpersonal competence - Abstract:
- Considerable effort has recently been directed toward conceptualizing and assessing how adolescents differ in their friendship involvement, focusing mostly on representing the quality or quantity of individuals’ friendship experiences and not often the organization of friendships with respect to one another. Whereas one individual’s set of friends may by integrated into a single, close knit clique, another’s may be spread diffusely across many separate cliques. The present study examined the assets and liabilities associated with diverse versus homogenous organization of friendships across groups, thus extending past efforts to understand friendship adjustment solely in qualitative or quantitative terms. Drawing partially on theories formed within organizational psychology, we predicted that individuals who prefer to be “social butterflies” with involvement in many non-overlapping friendships would enjoy added protection from social (but not necessarily emotional) loneliness and display greater interpersonal competence. We examined but did not necessarily expect that their individual friendships would suffer from lower quality, perhaps as result of the lack of group support for these relationships. Participants included 118 early adolescents from 11 to 12 years of age completed a battery of questionnaires including well-known and validated measures of friendship quality, social and emotional loneliness, and interpersonal competence. They also completed an original 6-item questionnaire that tapped their experience and preference for friendships organized across multiple friendship groups. All assessments, including the newly created Social Butterfly self-report, were internally consistent and reliable. Regression analyses indicated, as expected, that individuals who preferred and experienced friendship with individuals across many groups enjoyed lower levels of social and emotional loneliness and possessed greater levels of some types of social skills, especially skills for initiating relationships and managing conflict. Girls, but not boys, with diffuse friendship involvement had more friends overall, but importantly, all relationships held after controlling for number of friends, indicating that it was the organization and not the extent of friendship involvement that mattered. Overall, results indicate the promise of incorporating the organization of friendships into models of adolescent friendship adjustment. Of special future interest, is how the position of the “social butterfly” in the network changes or stabilizes over time.