Bullying victimization within the context of friendships is a complex phenomenon that is commonly experienced among youth, yet is insufficiently understood. Current psychosocial research examining bullying is often devoid of descriptions of the relationship that exists between those who bullied or are bullied (i.e., are they friends, enemies, former friends?), and there continues to be limited consideration of the underlying social dynamics and negotiations that occur within friendships containing bullying. Furthermore, there is a clear need for bullying research to consider how wider macro-level forces (e.g., social processes, power relations, and cultural discourses) can influence the bullying within friendship experience. Guided by a social-ecological framework, this dissertation reports on the findings from two empirical studies that investigated adolescents' experiences of bullying victimization within friendship. These studies involved interviewing previously victimized adolescents and young women; the analytical approaches were guided by thematic analysis and constructivist grounded theory. The results indicate that friendship victimization is a hurtful relational experience that involves painful emotions and carries significant interpersonal risks for adolescents. Furthermore, participants’ responses to their friend’s bullying behaviours were constrained by a number of barriers, such as depictions of bullying that individualize the problem, discourses of resistance that privilege overt responses, and gender expectations. Finally, the dissertation considers how teacher-student relationships influence peer bullying experiences and reemphasizes how teachers can be influential allies for bullying prevention and intervention.

This dissertation argues that friendship operates in mid-eighteenth-century English fiction as a privileged category of virtue, knowledge, and aesthetic value. By representing social tensions raised by extra-familial friendships and appealing to readers as friends, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, Sarah Scott, and Laurence Sterne, develop ideal friendship into a reflexive trope for cultivating authorial identity, framing literary response, imagining a public sphere, and theorizing social reforms. Amiable Fictions offers a new way of thinking about the ethical frameworks that shape experimental narrative techniques at a moment when the English novel is just emerging into cultural prominence. In this study, I analyze the ways that these four novelists represent friendships as allegorical meditations on interpersonal ethics so as to imagine literary exchange as a virtual form of friendship. I explore how the idealized communicative intimacy of friendship becomes a basis for imagining more perfect spiritual and economic unions. On the level of plot, these fictions unpack the philosophical values of real friendship by staging its antagonism with persistent forms of patriarchy, aristocracy, and economic individualism. Drawing from the values of friendship that arise in the plot, these authors shape narrative exchanges as a tie of friendship. In cultivating an amiable ethos, they avoid appearing as slavish flatterers in a commercialized literary marketplace, or as overly didactic figures of institutional authority. Amiable Fictions builds on studies of the novel genre by accounting for the way a rhetoric of friendship motivates experiments in narrative form. I offer insights into developments in epistolary style, free indirect discourse, unreliable narration, anonymous authorship, and autobiographical form. I suggest that the concept of friendship orients these writers in their exploration of techniques, propelling them as they articulate a range of possibilities available for future authors of narrative fiction. This dissertation also engages current scholarly understandings of sociability, sensibility, domesticity, and public and private life in the mid-eighteenth century. These novelists deploy friendship as a moral category that challenges codes of sociability, refines understandings of sympathy, and often antagonizes the emerging cultural authority of the domestic sphere. Reframing questions of gender and sexuality and their influence on literary forms, the project highlights how male characters imitate friendship between women (and vice versa), how social reform impulses raise the need for heterosexual friendship, and how non-familial friendship conflicts with domestic norms as an alternative mediator of public and private character.

This research is an exploratory step toward identifying how social inequality affects interracial friendship among women and opportunities to develop such relationships. By considering the nonlocal determinants of individual experiences and the ways in which structural variables may influence and operate in friendships, this research attempts to illuminate how micro-level action is actually rooted in "macrolevel" social processes. In keeping with feminist standpoint epistemology, this research begins with the subjective experiences of 15 pairs of African-American/white friends. The women's descriptions of their same-race and cross-race friendships provided a starting point from which to identify the ways in which racial/ ethnic and class inequality shape and operate in these relationships. Social inequality creates economic, ideological, and experiential divisions among African-American and white women. Opportunities for friendship were affected by the proximity of African-American and white women, and long-lived interracial friendships developed among women of similar classes in settings that fostered interracial contact and discussion of racial issues. Group position may also have contributed to the interviewee's desire to make friendships across race. Crossrace friendships were non-threatening and unique to the white interviewees, while African-American interviewees stressed the primacy of same-race ties. The voices of the women participants provided many examples of the ways in which interracial friendships reflected the dynamics of institutional racism and caused difficulties in their friendships across race. Racial/ ethnic inequality was exemplified by a lack of common base from which the women could understand each other, problems resulting from white racism and privilege, African-American interviewees' ambivalence over interracial dating, and different beliefs about the importance of racial/ ethnic identity. The divergent standpoints of African-American and white women created barriers to disclosure in friendships across race. African-American interviewee's experiences of everyday racism caused them to believe that their white friends could not understand their experiences and limited the kinds of information that African American interviewees felt that they could share with white friends. The standpoint of some white women enabled them to ignore racism and downplay the importance of racial identity. The need for African-American women to educate whites about racism and aspects of African-American culture sometimes obstructed interracial friendships. While African-American and white women may form affectionate ties, friendship is not exempt from, nor does it eliminate inequality.

They Shoot Single People, Don't They? is a romantic comedy of errors set in Boston about Lexie, a twenty-five year old pediatric nurse with still perky breasts and lightly dimpled thighs who can figure out pediatric drug dosages, but is so severely relationship-challenged that she can't make any choice at all when it comes to men. Her life becomes a convoluted mess that includes two guys and a tangled web of lies. After Marcus dumps her with a post-it note taped to her refrigerator door, Lexie thinks that her five-year plan to get married and have a baby are back in the crapper. She'd do anything to have ex-boyfriend's tongue back in her ear; that is, until the chain breaks in her toilet tank and handyman Duncan comes into her life. When alpha-dog Marcus reappears to reclaim Lexie, she's thrown into a tailspin and doesn't know which guy to choose. She finds herself up a tree and in a dumpster, and on one memorable night, she's standing on a toilet seat to discover whether Marcus is boinking her father's hot new babe in a stall at the Charles Hotel. Lexie lets herself get caught in a tangled web of lies. She leads Duncan to believe that Marcus is her brother and lets Marcus think that Duncan's just the guy who fixed her plumbing. They Shoot Single People, Don't They? is a novel that uncovers the insecurities of Lexie, a successful single woman, who equates personal satisfaction with being in a meaningful relationship. The book focuses on the lighter side of Lexie's pursuit, her frustrations of waiting for her real life to begin, and her awareness by novel's end that Marcus does not define her. She discovers that Duncan is the guy she wants. She's no longer worried about her five-year plan or worried that someone will shoot her just because she's single. Lexie doesn't know if Duncan is forever and ever, but she's pretty sure that he's the right guy for now.

Co-rumination involves friends spending a great deal of time encouraging each other to excessively discuss problems, with content being largely negative (Rose, 2002). Co-rumination appears to strengthen the bonds between best friends, while ironically exacerbating internalizing symptoms. Co-rumination is conceptualized as a mutual dyadic process, but little is known about the reciprocity of excessive problem discussion. The balance of college students' (N = 601) self- and other-focused co-rumination with their best friend was assessed via an online survey. Contrary to expectations, inconsistent and weak evidence was obtained for differentiating self- and other-focused co-rumination, and their balance. Specifically, self- and other-focused co-rumination were highly correlated, similarly correlated with other study variables, and not differentiated in exploratory factor analysis. However, the interaction of self- and other-focused co-rumination in a model including individual characteristics and adjustment yielded differentiated results. Friendship intimacy was associated with self-, but not other-, focused co-rumination. Indicating that balance may matter, anxiety was associated with high self-focused co-rumination in the context of low other-focused co-rumination. Additionally, mean levels of all individual traits (rumination, excessive reassurance seeking, social perspective taking, perfectionism, negative problem orientation) and adjustment variables (anxiety, depression, social anxiety, friendship quality) differed as a function of co-rumination balance, as assessed by a one-item direct measure. The validity and utility of distinguishing self- and other-focused co-rumination is contingent on further exploration with dyadic data and perhaps modified assessment. Rumination and excessive reassurance seeking indicated vulnerability for co-rumination, which appears to be a primarily anxious process.

Based on analyses of recorded real-life social interactions among English men and women friends living in England, this study shows how crucial it is to use a range of communication behaviours to express humour and maintain rapport. Men and women are keen to learn how to improve and preserve their social relationships (Mulac, Bradac and Gibbons, 2001). However, the immense literature on human communication ignores the multifaceted and positive force of humour in the social interactions of friends (Lynch, 2002). In addition, there is an absence of firm theoretical principles on which to develop counselling sessions and teach individuals to develop humour skills. Therefore, this study examines how participants incorporate humour in their ongoing conversation to achieve rapport in face-to-face social interaction in mixed-gender groups. This investigation is situated within the fields of human communication and humour and gender research. The necessarily communicative approach involved qualitative data collection and description, namely conversation analysis (CA) and ethnography, complemented by quantitative analysis. Communication context, that is, interactants’ attitudes and personality, their history, background knowledge, and how they relate to each other, are shown to play an important role in preserving friendships and maintaining rapport. Light is thrown on specific behaviours that could help men and women nurture their friendships and it is explained why there is a need for individuals to view humour as a positive force in their communication with one another. It is argued that misunderstandings may arise if men and women do not understand the way each gender uses humour. Thus, men and women could empower themselves by objectively examining how they interact, challenge the perceptions each may have about their own communication, and gain a more thorough understanding of verbal and non-verbal strategies for facilitating humour. By harmonising their verbal and non-verbal behaviours, men and women can use humour not only to express affiliation and commonality but also as a strategy for testing the boundaries of gender in a non-threatening way, to minimise differences, and to discover more about the opposite gender. In time and with further academic inquiry, humour could be acknowledged as a critical communication tool for establishing and sustaining relationships. The hope is that this study could be a catalyst for future research on promoting humour as a key element of daily social interaction. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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This thesis explores how social networking sites are changing the way individuals socialize in everyday life, and how users mediate this social media. The hypothesis explored is that Facebook user’s perception of risk, when using the site, is related to how they frame the technology. Drawing on conceptual and theoretical tools from science studies and the sociologies of friendship, risk and surveillance, interview data is collected and analysed in order to identify the dynamics that structure Facebook use. It is concluded not only that, as hypothesized, participant’s awareness and perception of risk is based upon their framing of the social networking technology, but also that the framing processes arise from the technosocial hybrid nature of Facebook. That is to say, it is not exclusively based on technological possibility or on existing social practices but instead by a constant balance between the two.

This multi-method study provides detailed information about the friendships of 87 children with ADHD (77.0% boys) and 46 comparison children (73.9% boys) between the ages of 7 and 13. The methods used in the study included parent and teacher ratings, self-report measures, and direct observation of friends’ dyadic behaviours in three structured analogue tasks. Results indicated that, in contrast with comparison children, children with ADHD had friends with high levels of ADHD and oppositional symptoms; they perceived fewer positive features and more negative features, and were less satisfied in their friendships. Observational data indicated that children with ADHD performed both more legal and more illegal manoeuvres than comparison children in a fast-paced competitive game. While negotiating with their friends, children with ADHD made more insensitive and self-centred proposals than comparison children. In dyads consisting of one child with ADHD and one typically developing child, children with ADHD were often more controlling than their non-diagnosed friends. Globally, these results were robust and did not seem to be affected by age differences, ADHD subtypes, comorbidities, and medication status. Given the increased recognition of ADHD in adolescence and adulthood as well as the fact that negative peer reputation in childhood very strongly predicts mental-health status by early adulthood, this research may lead to the discovery of meaningful ways to help people with ADHD achieve improved mental health and happiness over their lifespan.

Many psychologists have studied the effects of sports on children because it is an issue that is important for children and parents alike. Athletic participation is a popular activity in the United States for children and many begin sports at young ages. Theokas (2009) claimed that the importance of athletics is that sports are more than physical activity—sports have an influence in many other areas of a child’s life. The goal of the current review was to examine how sports affect children in domains such as: friendships, self-esteem, family, and academics. Athletic involvement helps a child in more ways that physical development and it is essential to understand the opportunity for life-long lessons athletics provides. The studies under review generally support child involvement in athletics for multiple reasons and implication of this review is that parents and school administrators should encourage sports in young children.