An examination of friendship quality and affective representations of friendship in children perinatally infected with HIV, children with asthma, and healthy children of HIV-positive mothers

The advantages of healthy peer relationships for children living with chronic illness have been widely documented, and yet the nature and quality of friendships in children perinatally infected with HIV have been neglected in the literature. The stigmatizing nature of HIV and the fact that the virus can cause damage to the central nervous system if inadequately treated suggest that this group of children may be at higher risk for poor-quality peer relationships than children with other chronic conditions. The primary purpose of this study was to examine the friendships and social expectations of children with perinatally-acquired HIV and compare them to children with asthma, a serious but less stigmatizing condition, and to children born to an HIV-positive mother who themselves were not infected with the virus. Children were recruited from hospital-based allergy and immunology clinics and related support programming, and completed measures of friendship quality, affective representations of relationships, and overall social functioning. It was hypothesized that children with HIV would evidence poorer quality friendships and more malevolent social expectations than the comparison groups. Contrary to expectations, results of this study suggested a trend for the children with asthma, not HIV, to demonstrate poorer indicators of friendship and the most negative social expectations of the three groups. An additional goal of this study was to determine whether children who were disclosed to their HIV status evidenced higher-quality friendships than those who were not disclosed, and also to investigate whether children who had in turn disclosed their HIV status to a friend had higher-quality friendships than those who had not. Results suggested no differences between the disclosed and undisclosed children in terms of friendship quality, while not enough children had disclosed to their friends to adequately examine potential associations with friendship quality. Finally, this study aimed to provide further evidence of convergent validity for the Children's Affective Representations of Relationships Scale (CARRS) by correlating children's scores on the CARRS subscales with scores on the Friendship Quality Questionnaire-Revised subscales (FQQ-R). As hypothesized, robust correlations in expected directions between the measures offered additional support for the validity of the CARRS.