Temporal approaches to the study of friendship: Understanding the developmental significance of friendship change during childhood and adolescence

With longitudinal studies and recently-developed analyses that can model change, it has become increasingly clear that many types of peer experiences during childhood and adolescence are not static. Instead, such experiences change in numerous ways over time, with significant developmental implications. Most of this recent work, however, has focused on change and stability in group-level peer experiences such as peer victimization, peer exclusion, and popularity. As a result, less is known about the extent to which change occurs, and the developmental significance of such changes, in youths' dyadic-level peer experiences and specifically their friendships. Thus, the goal of this chapter is to illustrate the importance of studying friendship change during childhood and adolescence. To do so, we first review the literature on friendship, in general, and then that pertaining to friendship instability and friendship loss, two related areas of friendship change research that have received some theoretical and empirical attention. We introduce a new friendship development model, and informed by this model, encourage peer relations researchers to consider other types of change in friendships. The concluding sections concentrate on the importance of learning more about friendship change for intervention and prevention efforts with youth.