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A great deal of research has shown that children's friendship is linked with mental health. Much of this research has placed a heavy reliance on determining popularity by a sociometric technique in which children nominate their friends, but this procedure fails to identify the intimacy component of friendship known to be important in adolescent relationships. The current study combined measures of popularity and intimacy in an orthogonal, factorial design to determine their relationship to two separate measures of psychological adjustment, self-esteem and sex-role orientation, in early adolescents. The results showed intimacy to be more predictive of psychological adjustment than popularity. The results are discussed in terms of the need to differentiate the components of friendship.
Townsend et al. (1988) studied this question.