Measuring Friendship Quality During Pre- and Early Adolescence: The Development and Psychometric Properties of the Friendship Qualities Scale

TLDR

The Friendship Qualities Scale is a theoretically grounded, multidimensional instrument that assesses five key aspects of children’s and early adolescents’ best‑friend relationships: companionship, conflict, help/aid, security, and closeness. Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed distinct yet related domains, with high internal consistency and validity shown by higher ratings for mutual and stable friends compared to non‑mutual or unstable friends.

Abstract

The Friendship Qualities Scale is a theoretically grounded, multidimensional measurement instrument to assess the quality of children's and early adolescents' relationships with their best friends according to five conceptually meaningful aspects of the friendship relation. These dimensions are companionship, conflict, help/aid, security and closeness. A confirmatory factor analysis, used to evaluate the factor structure of this instrument, demonstrated that these scales represented distinct, but related, domains of friendship. Assessments of reliability indicated the high level of internal consistency within each dimension. The validity of the scale was indicated by the observation of higher ratings for (a) mutual friends than for non-mutual friends, and (b) for stable friends than for non-stable friends. These findings are discussed according to the theoretical and practical issues related to the measurement of friendship quality.