Peer Relationship Pattern of Adolescents: A Study of Locale and Gender Differences

Abstract

 Peer relations are an especially important domain of social functioning for children and for adolescents. During adolescence, peers play a large part in a young person's life even while the family continues to be significant. In general, friendships offers youth with many positive opportunities despite the negative connotations that peer relationships have too many of us. Peer relationships are actually important for healthy development and essential for youth to develop into healthy adults. The present study is an attempt to find locale and gender differences in peer relationship patterns among adolescents. The study was conducted in purposively selected Government and private colleges of rural and urban areas of Ludhiana district. The study was based on 400 adolescents comprising 200 boys and 200 girls (equally distributed over locale; 200 rural and 200 urban) aged 18 to 20 years and hailing from intact families. The psychological tool used was Dimensions of Friendship Scale by Chandna and Chadha (1986). Results revealed that there was non-significant difference between rural and urban adolescents however, the mean scores of urban adolescents was slightly higher in comparison to rural adolescents in almost every dimension except enjoyment and trust. Gender wise difference showed that girls had higher scores in all the dimensions of peer relations except enjoyment and trust. Girls were found to be more accepting, understanding and spontaneous towards their friends and thus can be stated to have more intimate and better friendship than boys while, boys were significantly better in trust dimension than girls. This study represents an effort to contribute to this literature by examining the quality of youth peer relations using information gathered from adolescents.