Friendship Quality - Subject Follow-up

This measure appears in the following time-points: Follow06, Follow12, Follow18, Follow24, Follow30, Follow36, Follow48, Follow60, Follow72, Follow84.

Click the icon to view the questions asked for this measure.

Related Construct

Friendships

Description of Measure

The items in the Friendship Quality scale are an adaptation of those included in the Quality of Relationships Inventory (Pierce, et al. 1994). The original scale was designed to measure interpersonal support from a single romantic partner but our adaptation changed the focus to a global rating regarding the youth's five closest friends (participant's are asked to average the rating across these closest friends). The scale contains 10 items which vary the context of support offered (e.g. "How much can you count on the people for help with a problem", "How close do you think you will be to these people in ten years" and "How much do you depend on these friends" ). The youth responds on a 4-point Likert scale ranging from "not at all" to "very much". These questions are supplemented by a separate measure focusing on the background of the subject's four closest friends, including history of arrest, mental health hospitalization, and drug use (see the "Characteristics of Friends" measure).

A one-factor CFA model was fitted to the data. The model was satisfactory and produced the following values from the baseline time-point: alpha: .74; NFI: .94; NNFI: .95; CFI: .96; RMSEA: .04. This measure was also found to have good internal consistency at the follow-up time-points (6 month alpha: .80; 12 month alpha: .80; 18 month alpha: .82; 24 month alpha: .81).

One summary score is computed:

Friendship -- Quality of Relationship [S#FRDQLT]; mean of 10 items in the scale, at least 7 must contain valid data

Data Issues

Items in this measure are only administered if the subject indicates they have at least one friend (S#PeerChar_NFrnd: How many close friends do you have?). This item can be found in the Characteristics of Friends measure.

References

Items are an adaptation of: Pierce, G.P. (1994) the quality of relationships inventory: Assessing the interpersonal context of social support. In B.R. Burleson, T.L Albrecht & I.G. Sarason (Eds.), Communication of social support: Message, interactions, relationship and community (pp 247-266). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Pierce, G., Sarason, I.G., Sarason, B.R., Solky-Butzel, J.A., and Nagle, L.C. (1997). Assessing the quality of personal relationships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 14, 339-356.