Structural Components of Friendship in Adolescents with Cognitive Disorders

The article is devoted to the analysis of the friendship phenomenon among teenagers with cognitive disorders as a socially significant value, a factor for a child's socialization. The aim of the study is to explore the ideas of friendship among adolescents with cognitive disorders. The study involved adolescents, age from 14 to 16. The control group consisted of adolescents with a normal level of intelligence. The first experimental group consisted of adolescents with mixed specific psychological development disorders, who continued their education in correctional classes after the 4th grade (children with constant difficulties in learning). The second experimental group consisted of the adolescents with mild intellectual deficiency. The methods used are a standardized interview, sociometry, study of relations to family members, the questionnaire «perceptions of friendship», incomplete sentences, and projective methods (drawing and writing an essay «My friend»). The phenomenology of views on friendship is presented as a three-component structure consisting of cognitive, emotional-needful, and communicative components. Adolescents with health disorders, compared to their normally developing age-mates, are characterized by wrong views on the boundaries of mutual help and support, reduction of emotion-positive relation to a friend, simplified perception of the friend's image and his personal peculiarities, difficulties in mutual understanding and unstable relationships. The degree of intelligence decline influences all three components of the friendship phenomenon. Adolescents with constant learning difficulties define friendship as a process of joint pastime, highlighting personal value and importance of communication with a friend and constant emotional closeness. For adolescents with mild intellectual deficiency the disorder of the cognitive component is typical. It is expressed in the limited understanding of the friendship specifics. With presence of the high communicative need, they demonstrate instability of emotional contacts with peers and negativism manifestation. Adolescents' understanding of friendship is characterized with insufficient completeness of mutual help and support borderlines, richness of friend image in his personal peculiarities, fragility of emotional contacts with negativism manifestations. The research has demonstrated that all structural components of friendship understanding in adolescents with cognitive disorders have their own specifics and need corrections.

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