Longitudinal Study Of Character Strengths And Peer Relationships Among Junior High School Students

As one of the important subject in the field of positive psychology, character strengths are made up of a group of positive traits reflected through one’s thoughts, feelings and actions. Character strengths can actually have a significant positive impact on your life, and also on peer relationship. However, as one of the most important part of teenagers’life course, peer relationship has a predictor on some of the character strengths. Starting from the perspective of positive psychology, this paper studies the characteristics and development of character strengths and peer relationship among junior high school students, and has a further investigation on the relationship between character strengths and peer relationship.To address above issues,979 students from one junior high school in Tianmen as sample were included in the longitudinal study. The data about character strengths (relationship, vitality, conscientiousness) and peer relationship (peer acceptance, peer rejection, social preference and social influence) were collected through questionnaire survey. The relationship between character strengths and peer relationship was discussed by Cross-Lagged Analysis. The main conclusions are as the following:1. For junior high school students, relationship was the most significant while conscientiousness was the most insignificant. The five significant factors were:fairness, teamwork, leadership, love and forgiveness.2. Among the peer status groups, general type was the most while controversial type was the least. Popular, rejected and general were increasing with time.3. The character strengths and peer relationship had differences in gender. Girls’ relationship and social preference were significantly higher than boys’, while boys’ conscientiousness (Time2) and peer rejection were higher than girls’. Peer relationship had significant differences in mothers’education background and no significant differences in fathers’. Character strengths had significant differences in fathers’monthly income and no significant differences in mothers’.4. The Relationship and Vitality had differences in peer status type.5. Peer acceptance and social preference were positively related to relationship, vitality and conscientiousness. Peer rejection was negatively related to relationship.6. Peer rejection could negatively predict relationship, relationship and vitality could positively predict peer acceptance.