The nature and quality of friendship among form four students in two secondary schools in Penang

Research from social psychology in the area of intergroup relations has suggested that developing strong friendship is important in building relationship ties in multiethnic communities.This paper reports on a study which aims to determine the nature and quality of friendship among young people, in particular adolescents in Penang.The study administered an adapted 27-item Friendship Qualities Scale (Chua & Ang, 2010) to collect data from 230 Form Four students from two urban national schools in Penang. Although the findings indicate high sociability among the adolescent respondents, with a large number of them claiming to have out-group friends, close friendship seems to be patterned along ethnic lines i.e. in-group best friendship seems to be the norm for all ethnic groups.The number of out-group or interethnic best friendship is small but significant.This finding suggests a larger study to collect data at the national level so that interethnic friendship can be further examined.Overall, the students rated their friendship positively with the Indian students scoring the highest and the Chinese students scoring the lowest in their rating of friendship quality.The students of mixed ethnicity scored second to the Indian students, followed by Malay students