ABSTRACT
In his presidential address to the Society for Research in Child Development, Hartup (1996) suggested a framework for understanding the developmental significance of children’s friendships. Central to his framework is a distinction between three facets of children’s experience of friendship. The first is simply having or not having any friends. The second is the identity of children’s friends, which Hartup defined more specifically as the friends’ personality traits and other characteristics. The third is the quality of children’s friendships, for example, their degree of intimacy or their level of conflict.
