EXPLORING FRIENDSHIP ATTACHMENT STYLE, CONFLICT RESOLUTION STYLE AND ITS IMPACT

The purpose of this study was to look into Malaysian undergraduate students' friendship attachment styles, conflict resolution styles, and their effects. It focuses on how their friendship attachment style influences how they handle disagreements and how it affects their lives. The interview guide was employed as the major instrument to gather data in this study, which followed the qualitative research technique. Actual data was gathered from seven (7) Malaysian undergraduate students who had close friends and have had disagreements with at least one of them. Thematic analysis was utilised to examine the data, which was used to discover distinct themes from the interviews. For the purposes of data analysis, the interviews were transcribed. The three specific objectives of this study are: (1) to examine friendship attachment style among undergraduate students in Malaysia (2) to explore how friendship attachment style guide individuals in dealing with conflicts in their friendship and (3) to investigate the impact of attachment style. Some of the findings corroborate previous research that secure attachment styles deal positively with conflicts, while others, such as secure attachment styles can deal negatively with conflict and insecure attachment styles can deal positively with conflicts, are rather uncommon. As a result, to explain the latter findings, some recommendations for future research were included. The study's implications and limitations are also examined