Establishing friendly relations with primary school peers

Abstract

In our country, there have been few studies focusing on the exploraion of friendly relations among peers in the school context, especially those established among the pupils with developmental difficulties. Therefore, our goal was to get an insight into the quatity of the established friendly relations among pupils in regular primary school classes and to examine to what extent the developmental specificities of the pupils (pupils with developmental difficulties/pupils without developmental difficiulties), gender, age, general school achievement, and mother's and father's level of education predict friendships with peers. A total of 120 pupils (28 girls and 92 boys) from 36 classes of the fourth and eighth grades from eight primary schools from the territory of the city of Belgrade participated in our research. A half of the total sample consisted of pupils with developmental difficulties, while the other half consisted of pupils without developmental difficulties. We applied a socio-metric technique of peer nominations (a friendly relationship is established if two pupils nominate each other in the question "Name up to three pupils that you would like to be friends with"). In terms of data processing, apart from descriptive statistics, we applied a regression model that belongs to generalized linear models (Poisson's regression). The results indicate that the number of established friendships increases with pupils' age, better school achievement, and parents' higher level of education, and that pupils without developmental difficulties make more friendships with their peers than pupils with developmental difficulties. The findings of the regression model confirm that age and developmental specificities statistically highly predict the level of peer friendships, whereas this was not confirmed relative to pupils' gender, school achievement, and parents' level of education. The pupils without developmental difficulties are more likely to make friends with their peers than the pupils with developmental difficulties. In addition, the eighth-grade pupils are more likely to establish mutual friendships than the fourth-grade pupils. We selected the key implications and offer suggestions for further research.