Children's Understanding of Friendship Issues: Development by Stage or Sequence?

The structural-developmental model of interpersonal understanding proposed by Selman was investigated with respect to children's understanding of six issues of friendship: formation, intimacy, trust, jealousy, conflict and termination. Subjects were 81 boys and 85 girls (age range 9-11 years). A slide and tape presentation of a friendship dilemma was presented before a group-administered written assessment of levels of interpersonal understanding. The SOLO taxonomy was used to assess the quality of responses. It was found that girls and popular children had higher levels of interpersonal understanding than boys and unpopular children. There was also an order of difficulty for friendship issues as a function of two dimensions: concrete to abstract and familiar to unfamiliar. Results were interpreted as questioning the strict form of the structural-developmental approach, and as being more consistent with a model of gradual generalization.