Predicting Children's Loneliness: Quantity and Quality of Friendships.

It is generally well accepted in the adult literature that the quality of friendships correlates well with loneliness and the number of friends one has does not. This study investigated children's self-reports of quantity and quality of friendships as predictors of loneliness. Subjects (N=64) were third, fourth, and fifth-grade students enrolled in a university laboratory school. Each subject was asked to complete the Children's Loneliness Questionnaire and social relationships questionnaire. Subjects could identify as many as nine friends in each of three categories: In Class, In Another Class, and Outside of School. Additionally, subjects circled numbers from 1 to 5 to indicate how satisfying the relationship was. The results indicated that the children had a high rate of agreement in self-reporting of friendships. Quality of Friends in Another Class was the sole significant predictor of loneliness. This variable alone accounted for 25% of the variance of children's self-reports of social dissatisfaction. This school was based on humanistic theory. In this school teachers reported that they teach children acceptance of classmates and across grades. These factors may account for the inability of quantity of friends to predict loneliness scores for these children. Even though as a group children self-reported large number of friends, the incidence of loneliness was as high in this group as it was in other samples of children. (ABL)