No abstract

In order to provide a fuller and more satisfying description of the significant others in the social world of an adolescent, the Social Relations Questionnaire was developed and then administered to almost 3000 seventh-through tenth-graders in a midwestern suburban school district. The sample was randomly split in half and analyses were run on both halves separately to test for replicability. Results indicated that parents and siblings are almost always listed as significant others by adolescents in all four grade levels. Furthermore, the majority of adolescents listed at least one extended family adult and at least one nonrelated adult as important in their lives. The nonrelated adults lived closer to the adolescents and were seen more frequently and in more contexts than extended family members. Fewer extended family adults were listed in the older grades. Females listed more significant others than males both overall and in terms of both same- and opposite-sex nonrelated young people. As hypothesize, an increasing number of opposite-sex young people was listed as a function of grade level. Most nonrelated young people listed (a loose definition of peers) were from the same grade, same school, and same neighborhood as the respondent. The authors conclude that age-segregation in this community is not extreme (over 40% of the significant others listed were adults) and that the Social Relations Questionnaire provides a useful and holistic description of an adolescent's social world.

The verbal interaction of 31 middle-class early adolescent boys and their parents was analyzed to provide information about the impact of the onset of puberty and formal operational thinking on relationships in the family system. The boys were classified by age, physical maturity, and reasoning level. A partial-correlational analysis showed that patterns of interaction are related to the son's physical maturity, independent of his age or reasoning abilities.

The associations between menarcheal status and several child-rearing and outcome variables were examined for mother-daughter and father-daughter dyads. All variables were assessed with questionnaires as an extension of earlier observational studies. Analyses were conducted via multiple regression analyses wherein menarcheal status was treated as a continuous variable and was entered into the regression equation as a set of power polynomial terms. The results indicated that most of the significant relations occurred for the mother-daughter dyad, and most of these relations were curvilinear. When menarche occurs at or around the modal time, changes in parent-child relations may be best thought of as temporary perturbations, but when menarche occurs early the effects may persist.

The distinction between perceived closeness and parental warmth was explored by examining the relations between closeness and warmth and selected parent-reported and child-reported characteristics in 200 seventh-grade boys and girls and their parents. Results revealed that children perceived greater closeness with their mothers than with their fathers and that mothers perceived greater closeness with their children than did fathers. No differences were found in patterns of parental warmth. Conceived as a specific facet of warmth, closeness was found to be positively related to parent-reported measures of satisfaction with parenting and children's participation in family activities and to child-reported measures of self-esteem and expressiveness but not instrumentality. Parental warmth predicted little additional variance in satisfaction or participation, but it predicted a significant proportion of the variance in self-esteem and instrumentality above and beyond that predicted by closeness.