Developmental Changes in Young Children's Conceptions of Friendship.

The present study examined the development of friendship conceptions from 4 to 7 years of age. Subjects were administered an open-ended interview, a picture recognition task, and a forced-choice rating task in which they identified the most important characteristics of friendship. Common activities, affection, support, and propinquity were all found to be salient aspects of most children's conceptions. Friendship expectations concerning affection and support increased m frequency with age, while references to physical characteristics decreased. In general, parallel findings were found on the 3 measures, although the results were not as strong on the open-ended interview. The findings suggest that children first learn the overt characteristics of the occupants of the role of friend, but as they grow older they place increasing emphasis on affectively based characteristics.