Friendship, self- and friend-image among contemporary college students

This study explored the characteristics of friendship among contemporary adolescents. The following items were examined in this study : self-esteem self-consciousness, friendship, ideal-self, real-self, and friend image. Through the process of the cluster analysis, three clusters were categorized : 1) adolescents who took crowd relationship with their friends; 2) adolescents who were worrying about hurting their friends; and 3) adolescents who avoided a deep relationship with others. The adolescents in group one showed little insight toward themselves. The adolescents in group two showed some characteristics such as high insight, a significant positive correlation between real-and ideal-self image, already described in numerous researches on adolescents in the past. Adolescents in group three showed little association among real-self, ideal-self, and friend-image. All subjects in this study seemed to recognize each image i.e., real, ideal, and friend separately, when they described themselves and others in positive terms. In addition, the subjects selected their friend images in reference to their own self-images, when they described themselves and others in negative terms.