MEASURING FRIENDSHIP QUALITY DURING PRE-ADOLESCENCE AND EARLY ADOLESCENCE - THE DEVELOPMENT AND PSYCHOMETRIC PROPERTIES OF THE FRIENDSHIP QUALITIES SCALE

The Friendship Qualities Scale is a theoretically grounded, multidimen sional measurement instrument to assess the quality of children's and early adolescents' relationships with their best friends according to five conceptually meaningful aspects of the friendship relation. These dimensions are companionship, conflict, help/aid, security and closen ess. A confirmatory factor analysis, used to evaluate the factor struc ture of this instrument, demonstrated that these scales represented di stinct, but related, domains of friendship. Assessments of reliability indicated the high level of internal consistency within each dimensio n. The validity of the scale was indicated by the observation of highe r ratings for (a) mutual friends than for non-mutual friends, and (b) for stable friends than for non-stable friends. These findings are dis cussed according to the theoretical and practical issues related to th e measurement of friendship quality.