2021

The aim of this study was to test a longitudinal, transactional model that describes how social withdrawal and friendship development are interrelated in late adolescence, and to investigate if post-secondary transitions are catalysts of change for highly withdrawn adolescents’ friendships. Unilateral friendship data of 1,019 adolescents (61.3% female, 91% Dutch-origin) from the Tracking Adolescents’ Individual Lives Survey (TRAILS) cohort were collected five times from ages 17 to 18 years. Social withdrawal was assessed at 16 and 19 years. The transactional model was tested within a Structural Equation Modeling framework, with intercepts and slopes of friendship quantity, quality, and stability as mediators and residential transitions, education transitions, and sex as moderators. The results confirmed the presence of a transactional relation between withdrawal and friendship quality. Whereas higher age 16 withdrawal predicted having fewer, lower-quality, and less-stable friendships, only having lower-quality friendships, in turn, predicted higher age 19 withdrawal, especially in girls. Residential transitions were catalysts of change for highly withdrawn youth's number of friends: higher withdrawal predicted a moderate increase in number of friends for adolescents who relocated, and no change for those who made an educational transition or did not transition. Taken together, these results indicate that the quality of friendships—over and above number of friends and the stability of those friendships—is particularly important for entrenching or diminishing withdrawal in late adolescence, and that relocating provides an opportunity for withdrawn late adolescents to expand their friendship networks.

Recent work on bullying perpetration includes the hypothesis that bullying carries an evolutionary advantage for perpetrators in terms of health and reproductive success. We tested this hypothesis in the National Child Development Study (n = 4998 male, n = 4831 female), British Cohort Study 1970 (n = 4261 male, n = 4432 female), and TRacking Adolescents’ Individual Lives Survey (n = 486 male, n = 521 female), where bullying was assessed in adolescence (NCDS, BCS70: age 16, TRAILS: age 14) and outcomes in adulthood. Partial support for the evolutionary hypothesis was found as bullies had more children in NCDS and engaged in sexual intercourse earlier in TRAILS. In contrast, bullies reported worse health in NCDS and BCS70.

© 2021 The Authors. Journal of Research on Adolescence published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society for Research on Adolescence.