Friendship and Romantic Relationships During Early and Middle Childhood

Eleonora Cannoni and Anna Silvia Bombi

SAGE Open, 2016, vol. 6, issue 3, 2158244016659904

Abstract: 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 experiences.

Keywords: friendship; romance; middle childhood; drawing; interview (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244016659904 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:sagope:v:6:y:2016:i:3:p:2158244016659904

DOI: 10.1177/2158244016659904

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in SAGE Open
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().