High school friendship (in)stability from adolescence to young adulthood
Friendships have been found to benefit people across the life course. Individuals with more friends experience better health and well-being, are involved in fewer risky and criminal behaviors, and earn higher incomes as adults. Friendships are found to have many advantages due to the emotional and instrumental support they provide, as well as the sense of commitment they promote. Although it is known that there are benefits to friendships in every stage of the life course, relatively little information is known about how transitions between developmental periods impact the stability of such bonds. Identifying why some friendships persist while others dissolve can expand our understanding of how these social relations shape people’s experiences as they get older. In this paper Faculty Associate Wade Jacobsen and colleagues evaluate whether the rates and correlates of close friendship stability change by focusing on the transitional period when adolescents leave high school and begin young adulthood.
Using data from the Promoting School-Community-University Partnerships to Enhance Resilience (PROSPER) study, a longitudinal panel study that enrolled students from two consecutive sixth-grade cohorts (2002 and 2003) living in 28 non-metropolitan communities in Iowa and Pennsylvania, Jacobsen and colleagues tracked the trajectories of roughly 13,000 close friendship pairs from 9th grade to after high school completion. Rates of stability for high school friendships, or amicable bonds formed between high school classmates during adolescence to one year after their class graduated were compared by analyzing multiple panels of sociocentric and egocentric network data. Cross classified multilevel models were then applied to determine whether homophily, reciprocity, and transitivity become more important predictors of friendship stability in the year after high school.
The researchers found that rates of dissolution were significantly greater in the year after high school than between all other consecutive school years. Despite the high rates of turnover, over one third of high school friendships persisted during this transitional period. Social connections were more likely to remain intact if pairs reported similar rates of substance use in high school and if their relationships had a similar rate of reciprocity and transitivity. These findings suggest that the organizational features of high schools play at least some role in inspiring friendship stability since they present opportunities for interaction and foster common identities among classmates. Future work should look at whether additional features of networks, relationships, and individuals impact friendship stability after high school completion.
McMillan, C., Jones, K.A., Jacobsen, W.C., Ramirez, N.G., Feinberg, M.E. (2025). "Friends forever? Correlates of high school friendship (in)stability from adolescence to young adulthood." Social Networks V. 82.
