Abstract
This article explores refugee girls’ talk about friendship formation. Friendship is a complex process and a subjective experience. The study participants stressed similarity and cultural affinity as important criteria of forming friendships. Those who attended schools with a mixture of students described their native peers as having different temperaments and interests. Relatives were referred to as being best friends who one could trust and confide in. This suggests the need for a broad conceptualisation of friendship in research and practice.
Highlights
Adolescent friendships or the lack thereof influence young people’s everyday lives, educational attainment, health, and well-being (e.g. Almquist, 2011; Bergh et al, 2011; Hjalmarsson and Mood, 2015)
The ‘Results’ section begins with analyses of the school as an arena for friendship formation, and it includes reasoning on student composition and friendship opportunities, intra-ethnic friendships, inter-ethnic friendships, affinity, sameness, and difference. This is followed by a part analysing how the family can be a resource or restriction as regards the adolescents’ friendship formation, and it includes talk about trust, friendships with relatives, and organised leisure time activities
This study has revealed a diversity of conceptualisations and demarcations of friendship formation as they come across in refugee girls’ narratives
Summary
Adolescent friendships or the lack thereof influence young people’s everyday lives, educational attainment, health, and well-being (e.g. Almquist, 2011; Bergh et al, 2011; Hjalmarsson and Mood, 2015). Migrants may experience discrimination and exclusion and being referred to as ‘Other’, but they may sense that natives are different and refer to these as ‘Others’ (Jørgensen, 2017; Steen-Olsen, 2013). Most previous work on migrant friendship formation is based on data collected from schools, but some studies explore parents’ influence on children’s friendships It has been shown that children have more inter-ethnic relations in families where the parents have such relationships and support inter-ethnic contacts (Smith et al, 2014; see Shih, 1998). It can be presumed that if parents disapprove of the majority culture, for instance, regarding gender roles, clothing, and patterns of peer interaction (Steen-Olsen, 2013), their children may prefer intra-ethnic friends
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