Sex Differences in Children's Friendships

Abstract

This paper examines sex differences in the exclusiveness of children's dyadic friendships. First, differences in the frequencies of triad types representing exclusive and nonexclusive dyadic friendships are compared. As expected, girls are found to have a greater frequency of exclusive triads than boys while boys are found to have a higher percentage of nonexclusive triads than girls. Girls are also shown to have a higher frequency of exclusive than comparable nonexclusive triads while no such pattern exists for boys. A second analysis examines movement across triad types over time; it shows that girls tend to return to an isolated dyad while boys tend to expand their dyadic friendships to include a third person. The implications of these results for differential learning of social skills and for the experience of newcomers to a group are discussed.