College Students’ Friendship Quality

Abstract

The significance of friend support in the lives of individual's has been evidenced by psychological research across different age groups. Having friends was correlated with a sense of well-being across one's life span and that the developmental outcome depended on the quality of the friendship. This study was aimed at identifying quality of friendship among some selected college students using the friendship quality scale. Samples of 401 college students were selected using proportionate sampling techniques from four colleges in Ethiopia and standardized Friendship Quality Scale (FQS) was administered to the samples. Finally, the data was analysed via descriptive statistics (mode). The analysis showed weak quality friendship among college students in its entirety. However, among the four dimensions, separately the help dimension merely contributed higher percentage (69.3%) to the relationship of college students followed by acceptance (47.1%). With respect to the remaining two dimensions (safety and closeness), the friendship is weaker and accounted for 40.6% and 48.6% respectively. Therefore, this study showed that cooperation and support given among college students were mostly academic type. In non-academic spheres of life, these students are not interested to cooperative each other due to lack of both trust and attachment (i.e. closeness).