They're always there for me! Friendship and meaning in young people's lives?

Abstract

What gives individuals’ lives meaning is one of the bigger questions confronted by community members? Making sense of our lives and determining what it is that provides us with direction, strength, or commitment is no simple task and even more so in western consumerist societies where so many experiences appear accessible. Finding ways to elicit thoughtful responses from research participants, has led to varied approaches to this increasingly rich research area. An encouraging method is to use digital photography to extract information on what it is that captures participants’ ‘mind's eye’ when reflecting on meaning in their lives. In this article, a pilot study using a combination of digital photography and descriptive narratives was established to explore the thoughts of 174 year seven students in a private West Australian school on what provided their lives with meaning both in school and outside of school. The photos and narratives were explored for themes and while many categories were identified, it was apparent that relationships were the strongest source of meaning in their lives.

Propelling Children’s Empathy and Friendship

“…Schools and communities moved by such a creative and transformative feeling can become spaces free of violence, where all are welcome and included. The benefits of friendship in human lives are known; for instance, a study with seventh grade students found that relationships based on friendship are the main source of meaning in participating students' lives [17].…”

The Impact of One Book About Friendship in the Lives of Readers

“…In relation to friendship, the results have no relevance at all on the impact of friendship in the lives of people. It makes no concrete new contribution to the benefits that the scientific literature has found about what quality friendships provide: happiness throughout the life (Lyubomirsky et al, 2005;Waldinger, n.d.); bullying prevention (Canales et al, 2018;Duque et al, 2021;Roca-Campos et al, 2021), achieving meaning of the life (O'Rourke et al, 2019), better adjustment (Waldrip et al, 2008) and lesser risk behaviors (Telzer et al, 2015) among young people; better health among adults (Ríos-González et al, 2021); and prevention of loneliness and depression between older individuals (Mullins & Dugan, 1990).…”

“…The protective factor friendship has against bullying has been widely studied (Canales et al, 2018; Duque et al, 2021; Roca-Campos et al, 2021). Friendship has also proven to be a source of achieving meaning in life among young people (O’Rourke et al, 2019). Relationships based on friendship foster supportive and defending behaviors, as well as preventing others from acting in a violent way (León-Jiménez et al, 2020).…”

Photography as a Research Method with Learners in Compulsory Education: A Research Review

“…While all of the thirty-one articles reviewed for this paper focused on learners in compulsory education, they covered a wide range of topics within education in a variety of countries. These included gender and bullying in schools in England (Newman et al, 2006), inclusion of learners with special educational needs and disabilities in UK, Zambia and Indonesia (Kaplan et al, 2007), the school experiences of Black middle-class male youth in high school in usa (Allen, 2012), the views of learners in Nordic countries on healthy and unhealthy eating (Berggren et al, 2017), transition of learners from primary to secondary schools in Bangladesh (Shohel, 2012), the understandings of inclusion held by migrant learners in schools in England (Hanna, 2018) and friendship and meaning in young people's lives in Australia (O'Rourke et al, 2019). The themes explored are necessarily selective and not intended to be exhaustive.…”