Note: This workshop was jointly held with Center for Experimental Research in Social Sciences, Hokkaido University.

Date: September 7, 2009 (Monday) 10:30-12:00

Location: Hokkaido University, Faculty of Letters, room E204

Speakers: Chyi-in Wu (Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan)

Title: “Luminous Shine versus Dark Shadow: The Duality of Late Adolescent’s Friendship Network”

Participants: Toshio Yamagishi, Tatsuya Kameda, Masaki Yuki, Nobuyuki Takahashi, Keiko Ishii, Others (7 participants): Total 12 participants

Contents: 
Most previous studies have focused on the positive side of adolescents’ friendship networks, emphasizing on the significant and “good” effects on adolescents’ developmental outcomes. Our recent research findings have noticed a rivalry-like relationship that may exist in daily friendship interaction, indicating that friendship network somehow follows a forward-backward or an intimate-solitary trajectory, and which implies some crucial friendship characteristics, such as changing, dynamic and instable over time. In order to get a thorough understanding on adolescents’ friendship, we have launched a project from September,2008, collecting and recording changes of nine high school students’ friendship networks periodically. Since the “shadow” side of adolescents’ “dislike” network friendship characteristics for long is left ignored and unclear, this project intends not only to recognize the “sunny” side of adolescents’ friendship networks, but the “dark” side of adolescents’ friendship characteristics. By conducting this panel study, we attempt at first, to describe on the reality of high school students’ friendship dynamics over time with their monthly nominations, trying to find out for instance, will adolescents’ friendship contain two facets, that one is friend and the other is enemy? Or, will a friendship network display an overlapping over time, representing a shift and coexistence of both sides, implying a duality characteristic? We therefore launch a pilot study to model the changing dynamics of friendship network over time, aiming to sketch networks from unknown to diverse developments. Gender issue is also concerned in order to investigate gender difference on treating daily meetings. Our primary results show that (1) friendship networks truly display a great and unstable diversity, an overlapping “frenemy” network truly coexists on both sides, implying a duality characteristic on friendship dynamics. (2) Enemy network is more likely among boys, while those with higher competitive characteristics tend to get involved in frenemy situation. (3) Boys nominate their enemies more overly, while girls coverly.