What Does Friendship Mean to Me

Essay, Pages 4 (948 words)

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Introduction

For this project, the main idea was friendship, specifically, what their idea of friendship was. What is a friend? It could be many things, but more precisely a friend is “a favored companion”, as is defined by the Merriam- Webster dictionary. With this in mind, we observed how a child views their entourage, the way they think, and which values they have for their friends, how the older you get, the less friends you may have. It may be more likely.

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This may be caused by the way the person views themselves and want to be with more people like them. When looking at friendship through the eyes of children, what is believed as of now, between the ages 5-13 is that friendship is a bond between two people who enjoy each other’s company. Then, as they grow up to be 16-17, they begin to choose who they want to stay friends with and which ones they will keep contact with after high school.

Then finally, on average at the age of 17-18, an adolescent fully understands the idea of friendship. As a whole, the purpose of this experiment was to be able to understand what an early adolescent’s view of a friend is compared to that of a young adult.

Design

For this project, our group conducted and experiment. First, this would need both an independent and a dependent variable, what this means is that one variable will change slowly through time, and this change will be the deciding factor in what the dependent variable shall be.

Participants

There were six adolescents we chose to participate in this experiment. The first was Kalvin, age 11, he is a shy, friendly, pretty confident, male elementary student. The second participant is Alissandre, age 16, who is an open minded, sweet, simple, calm, bisexual female high school student. The third participant is Hugo, age 16, who is a curious, smart, very straightforward male high school student. The fourth participant is Emy, age 15, who is an outgoing female high school student in a horseback riding program. The fifth participant is Lucile, age 13, who is a shy and very smart female high school student in a horseback riding program also. Our last participant is Audrey, age 17, who is a confident, loyal, friendly and open-minded female college student.

Materials

For this experiment, my team needed to find a number of participants to partake in the study, as well as come up with questions to ask our participants for the interview, which would be done using a phone or camera. This experiment would have been a lot harder to conduct had I not been able to access the finished video Montag of all the interviews because otherwise I would have been unable to properly analyze their answers.

Procedure

Begin by asking the person that will be interviewed for his/her consent. Next, ask the guardian if they would be willing to sign our consent form. For the answers to be as clear as possible, explain how the interview will be conducted to the individual. The next step is to read the questions to the participant. Before asking the questions, we needed to tell them to answer honestly, as clearly and accurately as possible. If they misunderstand the questions, we told them to not hesitate or be shy to ask us any questions. After asking the questions, we thank them to have taken the time to participate in our project. Repeat this process for each individual being interviewed.

Analysis

When looking at the outcomes of this experiment, they did in fact prove to us that throughout adolescence, one’s thoughts on friendship changes, especially when they get near the end of high school. All our participants’ initial responses were similar, they spoke to us about companionship, support, and intimacy which are also the same bits of advice given by Sullivan. This does in fact support the idea that a friend is a favored companion, someone that is always by your side.

Overall, throughout this experiment, there were some weaknesses and strengths that my team and I came across. One weakness was trying to get Alissandre to do parts of the interview without laughing, it wasn’t anything major though. As for Emy, there are two little issues with her, first off, she was on a horse which made it more difficult to film, and also, once the interview was done, the sound is not very good considering we hear many background music in the arena. A strength that occurred, was the mention of Sullivan’s advice in the participants’ answers, they mentioned three, companionship, intimacy, and support. This was a very interesting find.

As a whole, throughout this experiment, something that I did learn was the fact that between elementary school and college, a majority of adolescents will change their friend group, change what their version of a good friend is, and how friendship is so important. I determined this because from the answers received by our candidates, they all have specific qualities they look for in a friend, and as they grow up, those qualities change, and you begin to look for friends who are more like your personality- wise so you could possibly get along better. Friendship is a strong bond that some people never break, some people have one or two friends they’ve had forever, since childhood. Those are the most fascinating friendships to me, because you don’t necessarily have a bunch of the same qualities, but you get along very well and always have a good time together, no matter how long it’s been. I am very happy with the results of this project.