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DANIEL HRUSCHKA
Department of Anthropology
Emory University

Project title:
"Between Friends: Rituals of Friendship in an American Middle School"

Middle school is a period of a profound change in the lives of many American adolescents. For the first time in their lives, teenagers entering middle school have both the capacity and the urge to fashion an autonomous social self and to cultivate their style—through dress, language, music, and the friends they keep. Both exhilarating and frightening, this newfound independence opens uncharted social territory, where family ties may weaken and those with peers gain strength. For many adolescents the transition is fraught with self-doubt and confusion. Common questions arise such as: "who am I?", "who can I trust to be a friend?", and "how can I be a good friend to others?" Although this transition to greater autonomy is a common event in the lives of American adolescents, there seem to be few established rules or rituals that guide them in answering these difficult questions. My research will address three questions about the paths that young adolescents take to making friends. First, how do students reach out to peers and forge friendships during this uncertain period of life, and what roles do rituals play in the process? Second, how do adolescents negotiate their growing autonomy with the competing need to belong? Third, what impact do different ways of making friends have on the mental well-being of adolescents?

To answer these questions, I plan to base my research in a place where American adolescents spend a bulk of their time—the middle school. My research will be grounded in a dialogue between in-depth qualitative interviews and broader quantitative survey methods. To accomplish this dual task, I will combine the complementary tools of anthropology and epidemiology. For an in-depth understanding of adolescent friendships, I will study a small group of adolescents selected from different social groups in a Covington, Georgia middle school. Through regular interviews, we will discuss topics such as friendships, social events, school life, family life, current worries and future aspirations. Later, interviews will concentrate specifically on how adolescents develop friendships and how ritual plays a part in this process. These interviews will further explore the ways that adolescents cope with the social difficulties of middle school and how adolescents define their own well-being. These interviews will provide important contextual data, while helping me to understand the diverse ways in which adolescents approach friendships and the various impacts that friendships have on their lives. These regular in-depth interviews will offer a sense of the variation in adolescent experiences not only between individuals, but also within individuals over time.

The interviews and participant observation will also provide information necessary to design surveys for a wider adolescent population. Complementing the in-depth interviews, anonymous surveys will give an understanding of how typical each of my informants is in relation to the general adolescent population. They will further allow me to test hypotheses about the relationship between different styles of friendship and the mental well-being of individuals. A social network component in the surveys will map out patterns of social relations, such as cliques and extra-curricular groups, while giving a measure of the varying degrees of flux that characterizes middle school relationships. Administered regularly throughout my fieldwork, these surveys will chart changes in students’ activities and social relationships.

The data will provide in-depth information about the unique and varied ways that adolescents cope with emerging sociality, and they will allow me to investigate the role that ritual potentially plays in the making of friends. They will further aid in understanding how adolescents envision their own well-being and how friendships play a part in their mental health. Finally, they will provide specific measures of sociality and well-being that can be used to test relationships between the social lives of adolescents and their mental health.

This project follows several of the MARIAL Center’s core goals. First, it will examine how ritual plays a role in the creation of friendships. Second, in line with the Center’s commitment to applied research, this project aims to generate data that can inform adolescent mental health programs and ultimately improve the lives of adolescents. More peripherally but just as important, this research, by understanding the lives of emerging adolescents, will provide information that may help families of adolescents to cope more effectively with this challenging period in a the life of a family.