ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the social distress expressed by adolescents with and without learning disabilities (LD), and provides distinction between unique adolescent's profiles, identified by their different types of social participation online. It examines the differential contribution of internet communication and virtual friendship in explaining the feeling of loneliness and social exclusion among adolescents with and without LD. Peplau and Perlman's classic definition considered loneliness as the unpleasant experience when individuals perceive a discrepancy between the desired and accomplished patterns of their social networks. In order to examine the relations between loneliness and the remaining variables, Pearson correlations were performed separately for the students with LD and the Non-LD group. To examine the internal validity of the cluster identification, a MANOVA was performed with the clustering of the adolescents and their LD belonging as the independent variables and their loneliness ratings and virtual friendships scores as the dependent variables.
