A new study looking at how friendships dissolve over the years has come up with some definitive, if not slightly gloomy proof, that most bonds formed in secondary school are unlikely to last.
The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, tracked 410 seventh grade (first year) students in the US to see how their friendships changed and evolved until they made it to the final years in secondary school, and found that only 1% of those early friendships manage to last to that point.
Amy C. Hartl of Florida Atlantic University headed up the research, found that the main cause of the friendships dissolving was fairly obvious: their differences got in the way. According to The Science of Us, the team of researchers "examined whether certain individual characteristics — like sex, age, ethnicity, aggressiveness, peer acceptance (popularity, in other words), and academic competence — affected whether a student's friendship was likely to last into high school", but none of those factors had an effect. In other words, it didn't matter if you were the most popular kid in school or not, your friendships were just as likely to fall apart as everyone else's.
Rather it was shown that friendships between popular and unpopular students or between boys and girls were more likely to dissolve over the years.
Hartl added that the friendships formed at these ages are emotionally very important as a result of the timing, as "growing independence from parents heightens interconnections between friends".
The study also showed that friendships formed in sixth class were "highly unstable, because primary school friendship groups are transformed across the first year of middle school (secondary school)", and that about half of all friendships formed in the early years of your secondary school career don't even last one academic year.
