According to the American Psychological Association, 160,000 children miss school each day because of a fear of bullying. Existing research indicates that the typical male style of bullying is distinctly different from the typical female style of bullying, which is referred to as relational aggression. This kind of aggression can cause damage to girls in the form of low self-esteem, eating disorders, and suicide. Research on female bullying has increased in the last five years, yet there is minimal research on relational aggression from the female perspective. The purpose of this qualitative study was to expand on the existing bullying research by exploring the opinions of 3rd, 5th, and 7th-grade girls (N=16) from a rural area of the Pacific Northwest regarding the definition, development, and response to female bullying and relational aggression with the use of semi-structured interviews. The main theoretical foundations for this study were the social learning perspective and the social information processing theory. Participant responses indicated differences by grade in the definition of relational aggression. There was general agreement among the responses that bullying increases over time. Participant responses supported previous research findings that victims, bystanders, and the bully suffer from the behavior. Findings from this study contribute to the body of knowledge about female bullying from a female perspective. This additional knowledge has the potential to assist education policy makers, school personnel, parents, and children in understanding and recognizing the female bullying process and consequences. This understanding will assist with recognition and intervention in bullying situations as well as the development and implementation of more effective bullying prevention programs specific to girls.

The strong Black woman ideal is a long-established image in U.S. society pressuring Black women to maintain a facade of strength at all times. The strength ideal is internalized as an integral aspect of their identity, so much so that Black women socialize each other to habituate behaviors reflecting strength. The Strong Black Woman Collective Theory (SBWC; Davis, 2015a) posits that Black women re-appropriate the strong Black woman image and use certain communication behaviors to affirm strength in each other. By exhibiting these behaviors, they delineate a safe space to promote solidarity within the group and confront oppressors collectively. This new theory needs to be corroborated with empirical data to examine how the theoretical tenets are actualized in a real-world communication context. To this end, the present study conducts a partial test of the SBWC theory by observing Black women friend groups engage in supportive discussions about racial discrimination. This is an ideal context to test the SBWC theory because the friends are gathering together as a group of same race-gendered persons; they are discussing the wrongdoing of an identifiable external hostility that they are motivated to retreat from and confront; and strength gets reified as a form of support during the conversation. The study advances a path model to represent the empirical associations among four key variables: strength regulation, group identification and solidarity, verbal confrontation, and relational quality with the out-group member. Fifty-two Black women friends groups (three in each) aged 18-89 years were sampled but only the data from the support seeker were used for analyses (n = 52). All data were collected in the home of one of the participants as a way to observe the supportive conversation in a safe, naturalistic environment. Structural Equation Modeling was used to test the Strong Black Woman Collective path model. The findings revealed that strength regulation was positively associated with group identification/solidarity, such that women felt more connected to the group when strength was regulated and reinforced. Also verbal derogation was inversely associated with relational satisfaction with the White woman aggressor. That is, support seekers reported lower levels of relational satisfaction with the White woman after she was verbally derogated during the discussion. The results also showed that strength regulation was positively correlated with verbal derogation, even though the relationship was approaching significance. Finally, verbal derogation had a very weak and nonsignificant association with group identification/solidarity. Findings from this study demonstrate that strength is functional in the context of Black women’s communication spaces and has important implications for their relationships with in-group affiliates and outsiders. The conclusion of this dissertation discusses the implications of these findings in relation to future articulations of the SBWC theory, extent research in Feminist Studies and Communication, and Black women’s day-to-day encounters with discrimination.

Friends are of crucial importance to lesbians� lives, their significance heightened due to lack of acceptance from blood family, work colleagues and society. Despite a proliferation of literature on lesbians� love relationships, lesbians� friendships remain understudied. In the light of theorising about widespread shifts in intimacy patterns in modern industrial societies, this thesis examines the role of friendship for contemporary lesbians. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, using lesbian feminist, feminist psychological and mainstream sociological theories to interpret lesbians� negotiations of their friendships and preoccupations with their own continually developing sense of self. The study finds that firstly, the most significant issue in negotiating friendships is deciding on a lesbian identity despite socialisation to �compulsory heterosexuality�. Friends are expected to be accepting and supportive or they are lost. Discrimination, the fact that the lover is the �best friend�, struggles with difference in lesbian communities, time constraints and a more general shift to individualism mean that community and family contacts are replaced by small, supportive and affirming friendship networks. These meet needs and within them lesbians negotiate a sense of self, but for the most part with no template of political consciousness. Secondly, while friendships are important, they are also difficult. The fluidity of the friendship relationship, blurred boundaries between friends and lovers, and women�s moral �imperative to care� all provide barriers to communication. Thirdly, while lesbians value �the relational self�, a confident sense of self is challenged when close-connected relationships sit at odds both with mainstream, heterocentric culture, and with traditional models of psychology which promote independence and separateness. Lesbians who are confident communicators, who have access to alternative feminist discourses which value relatedness, and who, together with their friends, are open to change, are able to negotiate satisfactory friendships and relationships. The study demonstrates lesbians� complex subjectivities as changing selves are negotiated through friendships, love relationships and communities, particularly through experiences of loss.

Various challenges can threaten the security of personal relationships, but one of the most difficult problems to manage is geographic distance. As more people live apart from someone about whom they care, the prevalence of long-distance relationships will increase. However, research on how long-distance friendships are characterized and accomplished lags behind. Therefore, the present study was designed to uncover how women define and maintain their long-distance friendships. A total of 34 interviews were conducted with first-year undergraduate students, first-year graduate students, and recently-hired faculty members at a large university. The interview transcripts were analyzed inductively, which resulted in the creation of nine categories. These were eventually reduced to six maintenance behaviors: openness, assurances, positivity, joint activities, personal networks, and mediated communication. Participants also challenged definitions of long-distance friendship based upon geography and replaced them with definitions based upon communication (access to interaction, use of mediated communication, level of closeness, and a commitment to expend the necessary time and energy to make it work). Although long-distance friendships may require more effort and involve more mediated communication, this study demonstrates that long-distance friends rely on similar maintenance behaviors as geographically-close friends. This indicates that long-distance friendships may not be as dramatically different or as perplexing as commonly thought. Overall, the present study reveals that long-distance friendships can be satisfying and maintained successfully, which challenges both cultural assumptions and traditional social science research. Many long-distance friendships are well-equipped to weather both changes and challenges, making them flexible, not fragile.

WOMEN’S RELATIONSHIPS: FEMALE FRIENDSHIP IN TONI MORRISON’S SULA AND LOVE, MARIAMA BA’S SO LONG A LETTER AND SEFI ATTA’S EVERYTHING GOOD WILL COME by KADIDIA SY Under the Direction of Renée Schatteman, Chris Kocela and Margaret Harper ABSTRACT This study analyzes female friendship in four novels written by black diasporic women and examines the impact of race, class and gender on women’s relationships. The novels emphasize how women face the challenges of patriarchal institutions and other attempts to subjugate then through polygamy, neo-colonialism, constraints of tradition, caste prejudice, political instability and the Biafra war. This dissertation uses characterization and plot analysis to explore the different stories and messages the novels portray. As findings this study foregrounds the healing powers of female bonding, which allows women to overcome prejudice and survive, to enjoy female empowerment, and to extend female friendship into female solidarity that participates in nation building. However, another conclusion focuses on the power of patriarchy which constitutes a threat to female bonding and usually causes women’s estrangement. INDEX WORDS: Women’s relationships, Female friendship, Female bonding, Sisterhood, Female solidarity, Female Empowerment

Friends are of crucial importance to lesbians� lives, their significance heightened due to lack of acceptance from blood family, work colleagues and society. Despite a proliferation of literature on lesbians� love relationships, lesbians� friendships remain understudied. In the light of theorising about widespread shifts in intimacy patterns in modern industrial societies, this thesis examines the role of friendship for contemporary lesbians. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, using lesbian feminist, feminist psychological and mainstream sociological theories to interpret lesbians� negotiations of their friendships and preoccupations with their own continually developing sense of self. The study finds that firstly, the most significant issue in negotiating friendships is deciding on a lesbian identity despite socialisation to �compulsory heterosexuality�. Friends are expected to be accepting and supportive or they are lost. Discrimination, the fact that the lover is the �best friend�, struggles with difference in lesbian communities, time constraints and a more general shift to individualism mean that community and family contacts are replaced by small, supportive and affirming friendship networks. These meet needs and within them lesbians negotiate a sense of self, but for the most part with no template of political consciousness. Secondly, while friendships are important, they are also difficult. The fluidity of the friendship relationship, blurred boundaries between friends and lovers, and women�s moral �imperative to care� all provide barriers to communication. Thirdly, while lesbians value �the relational self�, a confident sense of self is challenged when close-connected relationships sit at odds both with mainstream, heterocentric culture, and with traditional models of psychology which promote independence and separateness. Lesbians who are confident communicators, who have access to alternative feminist discourses which value relatedness, and who, together with their friends, are open to change, are able to negotiate satisfactory friendships and relationships. The study demonstrates lesbians� complex subjectivities as changing selves are negotiated through friendships, love relationships and communities, particularly through experiences of loss.

Thesis (M.A. (Health Social Science)--Mahidol University, 2007. / LICL has E-Thesis 0024 ; please contact computer services.

Thesis (M.A.), Psychology (Experimental)--University of Central Oklahoma, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 64-68).

This thesis explores how women experience their friendships with other women. The aim is to investigate the experience of female friendship through a feminist perspective and what meaning these relationships have for the women involved. To critically discuss the role it plays in their everyday lives, how norms and different power structures such as gender and class affect how women create and experience female friendships. Qualitative and semi-structured interviews with seven women were utilised to analyse how friendships are experienced. The women are all white, middle-class, between 25 and 68 years old and they have been interviewed individually.  The thesis applies a phenomenological perspective and focus on the lived experience of friendship throughout both the data collection and the analysis. The thesis discusses how friendship is experienced in different stages of the participants lives, using theory about temporality and life schedules. Friendships are expected to be central relationships in some stages of our lives, but then expected to be subordinate to romantic relationships at other times. This affects the temporality of friendships, forcing it to be among our most flexible relationships. Drawing on theories of class, social and cultural capital this thesis also explores how friendship relates to surrounding power structures. These become central in the women’s understanding of who they can become friends with, how the friendship is organized, as well as the temporality of friendship. The thesis also discusses how negative friendships are experienced, and how women negotiate these relationships. How the temporality of friendship also allows for ways and strategies to end friendships.

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