Friendship Choice and Attitudes to School

Abstract

This study was designed to test hypotheses relating pupils' attitudes towards the school environment to their social groupings within the classroom. These relationships were examined in a survey of 804 fifth-grade children in ten coeducational schools. The results showed that friendship clusters of pupils with similar school-related attitudes were characteristic of school classes, and that groups could be classified as being positive or negative in orientation towards the school environment. The property of cohesion was found to be positively related to the clustering tendency, such that the more cohesive the group, the greater the number of members within the group who shared similar attitudes to school.