Friendships' Influence On The Loneliness In The Only-Child Adolescents

Friendship is an important,interactive,stable and lasting peer relationship of adolescents, which is on the basis of trust, and is a relationship taken closely supporting as affective characteristic. According to Sullivan's theory, friendship played a regulation role in the teen-agers'adaptation when they got into adolescence from childhood. Based upon this theory, this research explored the friendship variation tendencies of the only-child adolescents changing with ages, compared the influences of the friendship on the loneliness, and tried to find out the path which friendship impact on the loneliness and depression through the Structure Equation Model. The conclusion consists of three parts.In the first part, the author had selected 328 the only-child students ranged from 14 to 18 in grade one of two high schools in Harbin by a random means. Then according to the measure scores and statistic analysis, the results showed that the amount of the friendship declined with the increasing of the age; the positive friendship quality fluctuated just a little, conflict scores raised as they grew older, and all these changes appeared when they were 15. But the loneliness and depression of the only-child adolescents always went up during the ages. Besides, when taking genders into consideration, the conflict and loneliness of boys were significantly higher than girls', and the positive friendship quality of girls were significantly higher than boys', maybe this was because boys were more competitive while girls preferred closed relationship.Part two aimed to explore the influence between the friendship of the only-child adolescents and their loneliness. The results showed that the friendship variables can significantly influence the feeling of loneliness, except for the variable popularity, all the others had reached significant level. At the same time, the regression coefficient of the loneliness and depression was significant, meaning loneliness of the only-child adolescents would lead to depression.Part three had focused on the structure equation model in the direct and mediate way, finding that only the positive friendship quality can influence the loneliness directly and significantly. The fitness of the direct model was good, combining the first mediation model, it was inferred that the self variable influenced the loneliness in a direct way though it didn't reach the significant level; the second mediation model fitted well too, taking the positive friendship quality as the mediator variable, the model was built between the popularity,conflict and the loneliness,depression, the results showed that the path coefficient of the only-child in later adolescence between popularity and positive friendship quality was not significant, but conflict significantly influenced the loneliness and then the depression, through the positive friendship quality.