The Association between Profiles of Friendship Qualities, Cyber-Victimization, and Mental Health Outcomes Among Early Adolescents

Background and Purpose: Friendship is an important aspect of positive early adolescent development. Friendships can not only protect adolescents from experiencing cyber-victimization or mental health outcomes, but also can be a risk factor to adolescents as they can be more detrimental to adolescents’ mental health when they experience cyber-victimization from friends. This crucial friendship can be captured by exploring the quantity of friends, but the different types of quality should have an increased attention. This study has examined the contexts and heterogeneity of friendship qualities among early adolescents, and how these diverse experiences of friendships are associated with cyber-victimization, depressive symptoms, and social stress using latent profile analysis. We then explored which profile was associated with mental health concerns and cybervictimization during COVID-19.

Method: The participants of this study included a diverse sample of 554 adolescents (41% African American or Black; 49% female) from a large, public middle school in the Midwestern United State during Time 1. Out of the 554 adolescents, 330 adolescents participated in time 2 data collection which was during COVID-19 pandemic. The current study used a latent profile analysis in Mplus to explore the subgroups of adolescents with similar item-response patterns to friendship quality. Friendship quality was examined using four positive domains (e.g., Intimate Disclosure, Satisfaction, Emotional Support, Approval) and five negative domains (e.g., Pressure, Conflict, Criticism, Dominance, Exclusion). Distal outcomes were examined using the Wald’s test, which compared mean level differences in outcomes (i.e., depressive symptoms, social stress, cyber-victimization) by profile membership.

Results: The results revealed four profiles of friendship quality; “absence of qualities” (13.9%), “average relationship quality” (19.2%), “healthy relationship” (59.7%), and “mixed friendship quality” (7.3%). “Absence of qualities” group has low positive and negative qualities and showed the lowest level of cyber-victimization experiences. “Average relationship quality” group had significantly higher levels of all outcome variables than the health relationship group. “Healthy relationship” group is the most ideal group, where they had high levels of positive friendship quality and low levels of negative friendship quality. This group had the lowest levels of depressive symptoms and social stress. “Mixed friendship quality” profile had a higher level of positive friendship quality compared to the absence of qualities group, but also had a very high negative friendship quality. This group had the highest levels of cyber-victimization experiences, depressive symptoms and social stress. Finally, the results show that having high negative friendship qualities before the pandemic is associated with heightened levels of depressive symptoms and social stress during the pandemic.

Conclusions and Implications: The results of the study provide evidence that examining friendship quality is very critical when we consider friendship as a protective processes. This study shows that it is important to promote health relationships by increasing positive friendship quality and decreasing negative friendship qualities, especially as we want to tackle other parts such as cyber-victimization, depressive symptoms and social stress. This study aims to present new strategies and practical implications on increasing adolescents’ positive friendship experience.