Friendship and dating relationships among French adolescents

The focus of this study is to analyse, within the same population, the specificity of friendship in comparison with dating relationships among French adolescents. The subjects interviewed (63 boys and 82 girls, aged 15 to 19 years), all volunteers, were recruited from three "classic and modern" senior high schools and three vocational high schools. The data were collected by using a semi-directive interview (recorded) dealing with subjects' friendships and dating relationships. All hypotheses were confirmed: (1) Friendship between partners of the same sex constitutes the main form of privileged interpersonal relationship in early and middle adolescence. (2) The specificity of interactions between partners lies in their mode of relationship: psycho-social exchanges are more intimate between friends than between dating partners. (3) Exchanges between friends are more intimate than between dating partners even when these partners have complete sexual intimacy.