‘Friendship in all directions’: Norwegian children with physical disabilities experiencing friendship

Abstract

This article examines how Norwegian children with physical disabilities experience friendship during the transition between primary and secondary school. The research was based on 38 life mode interviews with 15 children. Two themes were explored: (1) different kinds of friends: friends with disabilities, friends without disabilities and technology-mediated friendships; and (2) qualities of friendship: understanding, intimacy and trust, mutuality and friendships with children both with and without disabilities. The conclusion is that children with physical disabilities adapt to different, but mutual friendships.

Keywords

Children disability friendship interdependency mutuality transition between primary and secondary school

Good friends seem to be vital to experiencing good quality of life and having good friends contributes to psychological well-being. Research conducted on the experience of young people highlights that without friends it is almost impossible to be happy (Helseth and Misvær, 2010). In addition, those who are lucky enough to have good friends are more likely to have high self-esteem; friends offer support, affection and shared experiences (Furman and Buhrmester, 1985; Han and Chadsey, 2004; Weiserbs and Gottlieb, 1995).

Since some research indicates that friendship can have an extensive impact on the quality of life in general, we ask what role friendship might have for children with physical disabilities. In this field, research indicates that friendships between children with physical disabilities and their local non-disabled friends are limited when it comes to social activities. Some children with disability experience more social isolation and exclusion than peers both at school and in their local environment (Doubt and McColl, 2003; Mulcahey, 1992; Mulderij, 1997; Pollock and Stewart, 1990; Stevens et al., 1996). Both friendship and social acceptance are relationships where children with disabilities sometimes are at risk of being avoided or socially excluded. They can also be hindered from physical access to social arenas in their environment, like school or fast food outlets where friendships are established, formed and maintained (Asbjørnslett and Hemmingsson, 2008; Cocks, 2005; Mulderij, 1997; Watson et al., 1999; Weiserbs and Gottlieb, 1995). Despite the assumed risks, a Canadian study indicates that adolescents with physical disabilities report good self-esteem and many close friends, however fewer intimate friends and lower levels of peer integration (Stevens et al., 1996).

When children grow to be adolescents, friendships tend to be characterized by a sense of closeness, sharing and intimacy, qualities that develop over time (Estell et al., 2009; Hartrup, 1995). However, friendship is based on group norms and some children who are not disabled show patterns of personal avoidance towards friendship with children who are disabled (Hallberg et al., 2011; Weiserbs and Gottlieb, 1995). Spending too much time befriending or helping disabled classmates can be a social risk with regard to other friends and schoolwork (Nota et al., 2005). From a practical stance, similarities in interests, having things in common, for example sports activities, can also exclude close friendships with children who are disabled, if they are not capable of participating (De Schauwer et al., 2009; Kalymon et al., 2010).

For all children in Norway school is a central arena for interacting, establishing and developing relationships with peers of the same age (Gulbrandsen, 2003; Wendelborg, 2010). It is unusual for children with physical impairments not to attend their local schools (Tøssebro et al., 2006). A recent study shows that social acceptance and peer intimacy depends on opportunities for social participation with peers during leisure time (Wendelborg and Kvello, 2010). Similar results were discovered by another study of friendship, which focused on children between the ages of 9 and 15. That study showed that the most important characteristics of friendships are ‘to trust’, ‘to be kind/nice’, ‘to be supportive’, ‘to have a sense of humour’, ‘to share common interests’ and ‘to be intelligent’ (Kvello, 2006). Social acceptance is, however, not equivalent to having friendships, which are often defined by mutuality, extension over a period of time, willing participation and positive effects such as liking each other (Kvello, 2006).

Many studies point to the obstacles that some children with disabilities encounter. From the selected research we have found no clear understanding of how friends are chosen, established and kept vital. Few studies explicate the interactive process of being or having a friend in children’s social world, nor do they explain how developing conceptions of friendship become embedded in peer culture (Corsaro, 1992). This state of affairs inspired us to further explore how children with physical disabilities themselves experience and thematize friendships. We pose the following questions: how do children with disabilities experience different friendships? How do they adapt to friendship with friends in their local environment and/or other disabled friends? How are these friendships shaped by the children themselves?

Theoretical approaches

As stated in the introduction, current research shows that friendship plays a key role in social participation and vice versa. Also from a philosophical and Aristotelian perspective (Aristotle, 1999), friendship is presented as an absolute necessity for life; one would not like to live without friends (Aristotle, 1999). Friendship depends on finding the ‘good’ in people, opening up the possibility in oneself of being kind, loveable and trustworthy to the other. In any true friendship there is interdependent mutuality and open-handed benevolence. You cannot form a friendship or be friends with someone before that person shows him or herself to be loveable and trustworthy. According to Aristotle, the desire for a friendship comes quickly, but not the friendship itself (1999: 127–31).

Both research and philosophy of friendship argue that mutuality gives the best quality of friendships (Bukowski et al., 1994). Interdependent friendships are bound up with the need to be involved with others. In order to be friends with others one must be seen as, and see oneself as, a part of the group or pair of friends, and one must be able to master certain social situations, which demands group self-awareness (Bostad, 2010). Being the only one in a group of children with a particular diagnosis may cause a child to be more self-aware of his/her disability, as well as how other children perceive that child as different (Gulbrandsen, 2010).

The search for meaning in friendships is thus individual, but always part of a social process. It is something people do together, in real interactions where shared focus, experiences and interests can create, establish and refine meaning (Gulbrandsen, 2010). From a social and relational perspective, the children in this project are always seen as being in the world with others, which is in line with a hermeneutical understanding of the human being in the world (with others) and belonging (in the world with others) (Gadamer, 2004 [1989]; Heidegger, 1962). In this article we investigate friendship further, keeping in mind the philosophy that being-in-the-world with others is always relational and interdependent.

Data and methods

The present study is based on 38 tape-recorded interviews with 15 children with impairments (9 boys and 6 girls) living around the city of Oslo, Norway. They were all in their last year of primary school when included in the study. They were all 12 or 13 years old when first interviewed, and either 13 or 14 years old by the end of the project period.

The selection criterion was that the children were living with impairments. All the children were born and diagnosed with different impairments. For the purposes of this article, impairment was defined as a functional limitation of the individual caused by physical, mental or sensory deficiency (Shakespeare, 2006). Fourteen children are diagnosed with physical impairments, one with a visual impairment. Two of the boys are diagnosed with a learning disorder as a second diagnosis. Five of the children are wheelchair users, while six of them walk, more or less assisted by technical aids like a wheelchair or orthopaedic orthosis (one child with a visual impairment uses different technical aids).

Professionals from different communities, such as teachers and occupational therapists, were contacted directly and asked to help recruit children for the study. They represented the first step towards gaining parental permission, which can be considered a gatekeeping question (Hill, 2006). However, this was not a problem in this study. Most professionals considered the study important and they would, on our request, seek out potential informants and then contact the children’s parents. The parents were informed about the project verbally, as well as through an information letter and a brochure. If the parents approved, they talked to their children, asking if they wanted to participate in the project. If parents and children reacted positively to participating, the professionals would inform us and we could make a direct contact with the parents to arrange the first interview with the child.

The life mode interviews used in this study constitute a qualitative method, suitable for interpreting children’s concrete experiences from their daily lives. The interviewer asks the child about what happened yesterday and what a normal day consists of (Andenæs, 1991; Gulbrandsen, 2010). Communicative validity regarding the child is established by foregrounding the child’s own self-understanding of everyday life events, and trying to understand the meaning of the child’s statements throughout the interviews (Kvale and Brinkmann, 2009). The children’s descriptions were followed up by additional questions like: ‘What happened then?’, ‘With whom?’, ‘Is that normal?’, ‘Who where you with?’, ‘Could you tell me some more about him/her?’ and ‘Why is he/she a good friend to you?’ Three different researchers conducted the interviews in the period between May 2009 and November 2010. The interviews were conducted at the children’s schools or homes. All the children were attending primary school when first interviewed. During the last interview all of them had transitioned to and attended their first year of secondary school. Our intention was to interview all of the children three times, once during their last year in primary school, once after starting secondary school and again at the end of first year at secondary school. However, two children were interviewed only once, five of them twice, six of them three times and two were interviewed four times. Some of the first interviews served as a pilot that allowed the interviewer and child to become acquainted; these are also included in the material. Four children are explicitly represented in the nine quotations used in presenting the data; all the children are implicitly referred to several times in the text. The text therefore represents all the children, as explained in the results.

Ethically this study is approved by the Regional Committees for Medical and Health Research Ethics (REC) and the Norwegian Social Science Data Services (NSD). It follows all legal requirements for the protection of personal information and against being recognized through diagnosis. The parents have given informed consent for their children to participate (Kvale and Brinkmann, 2009), and each child also had his/her own written assent letter to read and discuss with the parents and to sign before we could make direct contact (Helseth and Slettebø, 2004; Hill, 2006). All the children assented to having their interviews recorded, analysed and included in the study. The one child who withdrew after the first interview was contacted and gave approval through a new assent letter that we could use and analyse this interview.

Interpretation and data analysis is a process of interpreting children’s statements both during interviews and then using the transcribed texts. The analysis as such has not followed a stringent procedure, and the different phases or research have overlapped and interplayed (Groven and Engelsrud, 2010). Formal empirical analysis of transcribed texts is based on Kvale and Brinkmann’s approach to analysis of qualitative research (Kvale and Brinkmann, 2009). This approach consists of the analysis of themes, categorization and expansion to theoretical enquiry. Three steps are followed: (1) analysis of meaning from self-understanding, (2) critical common sense understanding and (3) theoretical understanding. After transcribing and reading all the material over and over again, several recurrent topics on the subject of friendship as expressed by the children were isolated. These consisted of questions such as: who do the children consider to be their friends? Why? How does disability emphasize or minimize certain qualities of friendships for boys and for girls? These questions led to the formation of different categories of friends and categories of qualities that aid children in adapting to different friendships and being good friends. In the step of critical common sense understanding, the scope of interpretation is broadened beyond the subject’s self-understanding. During this stage, the authors would critically discuss and interpret what the child was saying and what his or her situation might have been, such as being the only child with a disability in his/her class. The goal was to critically review our initial interpretations of the statements and the children making them (Kvale and Brinkmann, 2009). This new understanding is particularly concerned with children’s awareness of disability in different friend relations, guided by the empirical data.

The step theoretical understanding describes a theoretical context in which a higher level of abstraction is applied to interpretation of the children’s interviews and as used in the discussion (Groven and Engelsrud, 2010; Kvale and Brinkmann, 2009). Our results are based on two themes: friendships with whom? and qualities of friendship. The first theme is broken down into the following categories: friends with disabilities, friends without disabilities and technology-mediated friendships. The second theme, qualities of friendship, is analysed using the categories of understanding, intimacy and trust and mutuality and interdependency.

Results

Friendships with whom?

Who you call friend can vary, from someone you say hello to at school to your best friend, who you can share everything with. All different sorts of people can be your best friend, but most of the children in this project have a best friend who is also disabled. Best friends can also be kept through long-distance relationships – they might be someone the child talks to almost every day using a cell phone or the internet. Children in this study distinguish between friends with and without disabilities. They often share leisure time and sports activities with other children who have the same or a similar diagnosis. These friends are important and are sometimes considered ‘family’. However, because friends with disabilities usually live far away, these friendships are time consuming and require transport. When transitioning to secondary school, schoolwork becomes more challenging, friends change and some new priorities are formulated. Some children choose to spend more time with local friends who are not disabled; others spend more time with friends who are disabled.

Friends with disabilities

Activities with other wheelchair users are easier. My best friend and I, we have known each other almost since we were born and she means everything to me. She is also in a wheelchair; she has got the same [diagnosis] as me. The last time we were together we went to a shopping mall, we learned to stay on the escalator and it was fun. (Girl, 13 years old)

Leisure time can offer a space to be together at the ‘same level’ in activities, which is not always the case at school, where disabled children often are stuck observing the activities of others. Long-term friendships with children with disabilities often seem to be strong because of the mutuality involved in sharing both diagnosis and activities that are adapted to particular impairments. In friendships like these, the child is not seen as different, but as a natural part of a group situation. The example above shows that a girl could even be considered an expert in wheelchair activities. In a group situation, such as that one, the awareness of impairment in itself is foregrounded in a positive sense, and serves as a qualification to the mutuality in the friend relationship. This is an important distinction that exemplifies the importance of the child’s subjective perspective. In this situation – a diagnosis that from the outside might be seen as a purely inhibitive – disability actually serves as a quality that allows a special kind of friendship. For the girl in this example, friends with disabilities became even more important after attending secondary school. Such relationships are often established by parents, who seek other families in the same situation when the children are very young. A few parents, whose children did not have any contact with others with a similar diagnosis, have commented that it would be nice for the children to meet someone more alike.

Friends who are not disabled

At school I mostly have healthy friends. I do not feel I am very different from them and they treat me like anyone else. What I like about them is that they treat me a lot like a totally normal person, not like I was somehow different and I actually have friends within my own class. . . . I also have friends with handicaps, whom I do not meet at school, but at different sports I take part in. (Boy, 12 years old)

In this boy’s reflections, one gets the sense that his feeling about being treated like anyone else at school indicates a risk of not being treated as children who are not disabled. In those terms, a sense of difference is stated and underlines the children’s awareness of being different from their classmates. However, at school being ‘one among the others’ is important and being like everyone else is associated with friends who are not disabled. One girl says that when she is at school, she almost forgets about her diagnosis; one boy tries to walk instead of using his wheelchair.

One girl stops using both her electric wheelchair and her bike with supporting wheels when she attends secondary school. She says it is embarrassing. However, in this case when walking to school, her friend adjusts to her slow walking speed, sharing small talk about movies and television series, a mutual interest of theirs. In the school setting, disability in itself is not a qualification for forming friendships. This often means that some aspects of disability need to be suppressed in order to adapt to friendships at school. These adjustments can be understood as an attempt to cope with disability by aligning oneself with accepted normality. The children indicate that they constrain themselves in this way because of the risk of being treated as different from them. This awareness was shared by all of the children interviewed. But when a disabled child has a lot to offer as a good companion, impairment in itself is not a hindrance from involvement with good friends who are not disabled.

Technology-mediated friendships

A lot of friends are on the internet, talking about comic books. When I was at summer camp I made a lot of friends and I have their MSN addresses and then I get lots more friends from them, in the end I get to know a lot of people. Almost everybody is on Facebook, so you talk to them, you get to know them and you know who the others are in a way, everybody is more connected in a way, you know who everybody is. (Boy, 13 years old)

I have a boyfriend now, we have been together for six months, I met him at summer camp. I keep in contact with him through my cell phone, we talk every day and it doesn’t cost anything. We will meet again this summer, it will actually be the first time I’ve seen him for six months. (Girl, 13 years old)

Internet and cell phones are important for sharing interests with friends, and they can also help to maintain intimacy in long-distance friendships. The children indicate a familiarity with having friends on Facebook. They do not always know people prior to becoming friends with them on the social networking site, however Facebook friends you did not know previously become familiar faces when you meet them in person, and it is easier to say hello. These internet friendships can increase children’s social confidence when attending secondary school, where many children are new to each other. Facebook can make it easier for children to get to know each other in different ways and strengthens a sense of community for those who participate. In our study, typical shared online interests for boys include reading comics and being part of Harry Potter World. They do not always participate in these activities with people they know from before. Boys are especially eager to discuss shared interests with peers on the internet. They get into contact with children all over the country, but also locally. The use of Facebook and Microsoft Live Messenger (MSN) as media for developing social friendships is seen as positive in our study because of the sense it gives the children of knowing each other.

Qualities of friendship

Good friendships rely on mutual understanding, intimacy and trust. Degrees of talking about their diagnoses and sharing intimate information vary between the informants. For some, it is a strain to share intimate information with local friends, even though being more open might make building friendships easier. Furthermore, sharing activities and helping each other are a central part of the friendship discourse. Desirable qualities of friendship for the boys in primary school revolve mostly around being a part of activities considered play, especially football during break. The boys in our study do not seem to care much about what the girls are doing. The girls are more talkative about their interest in boys, they also start to wear makeup at the end of primary school. This affects ideas about desirable qualities in a friend, as the boys’ discourse on friendship is more practical, while the girls’ discussions are more intimate, like the sharing of secrets. At secondary school, physical play becomes less important for both girls and boys. Socializing across gender lines becomes more important when attending secondary school. Being together requires space and place, sometimes expanding and sometimes limiting the ability of children with disabilities to attend social activities.

Understanding

One boy thinks he is lucky to have a friend with the same diagnosis at the same school, living close by in the neighbourhood:

My friend has the same [condition] as me, but a lot less. He also has problems playing football, I cannot do that either. He is not in a wheelchair, so he is not as strong as I am [he is referring to the arm strength he has acquired through using a manual wheelchair] . . . But what is nice is that we have the same diagnosis, we understand each other really well. (Boy, 12 years old)

This boy’s friendly comparisons between him and his friend relate the way they understand each other’s conditions, problems or strengths. Not being able to play football for real is a mutual experience. Mutuality in friendship can mean sharing problems related to diagnosis even if friends function on different levels. Another girl (13 years old) says that leisure time friends understand me best. She states that this understanding is connected to those friends having the same disability as her, which allows her to feel more at home with them. Being with the ones who understand you best is also a situation where you can learn and ask about things concerning the diagnosis.

Intimacy and trust

Friends borrow clothes from each other, but we also borrow toilet articles from each other all the time, and we can also share medicine. . . . I can tell her everything, I don’t feel I can say everything to the others, but to her I can talk about difficulties and challenges. . . . I feel a little bit more at home with friends who are in a wheelchair, because they understand me better. I can ask them things others wouldn’t understand. I don’t feel safe telling everything to my friends here, I wouldn’t dare. (Girl, 13 years old)

This quotation brings up the practice of borrowing and sharing between good friends. For this girl, the intimacy of sharing medicine and toiletries is reserved for only one friend, her best friend. Their intimacy also allows her to reveal private aspects of the diagnosis to another girl with the same diagnosis, which can be difficult to do with school friends. She distinguishes between those she can trust – her friends with disabilities – and those who she cannot trust in the same way – the school friends. She is unwilling to tell all her secrets to the school friends, because of the danger of what she calls being ‘misused as a friend’. This reticence is directly related to not daring to expose all the intimacy of her impairment. She uses the phrase ‘feeling at home’ to describe a sense of a good friendship, one that allows her to be who she is and feel safe. Another boy is more confident with giving intimate information in local settings:

They don’t think I look repulsive or anything. If there is something they want to know, they just ask. No one has mentioned it [referring to conditions regarding his diagnosis] when they know what they need to know and they understand better. It has been all right giving information and they protect you more.

This boy is confident in sharing information about his condition, and trusts his friends, who are protective of him. In this quotation he uses the strong term ‘repulsive’, which shows an awareness of the response some aspects of impairments might elicit in certain social situations. For this boy, the characteristics of his impairment do not draw negative reactions from his friends, which is not always the case. Some children tell the researchers about comments about how they look which are not positive. Either way, both boys and girls talk about good friends who take their disability into consideration, for example by adjusting to ‘slow walking’ when accompanying them to school.

Mutuality and interdependency

Friends are very important, because you can get help from them. If you have some problems, you can cooperate in a way. . . . [My friend and I] usually do things together every day, and I often go to his house after school. I feel he can help me if I need some help, and I can talk to him. . . . He is a good buddy, he stands up for me, he also comes with me to the health club. He helps if there is anything I need help with. (Boy, 13 years old)

This quotation illuminates the importance of getting help at school, but also reliance on a friend who can help in practical situations, like picking up a pencil or getting food from the school cafeteria. However, mutuality depends on being able to offer something in return. One of the physically disabled boys says that he helps a friend who is blind by taking him out for walks, which he underlines as important to this friendship. The mutuality in this friendship lies in his friend’s kindness to him. Doing things together, both at school and after, is a quality of friendship. Playing video games is a normal activity among boys, but requires physical access if you use a wheelchair. The next example indicates one girl’s experience of a classroom situation in secondary school:

I used to be shy, but that changed. It’s impossible not to laugh with the others; the boys are childish in a funny way. (Girl, 13 years old)

This girl, who has a visual impairment, was worried about how to make new friends when transitioning from primary to secondary school. But when we spoke to her at the beginning of secondary school, she had succeeded in making totally new friends. It had become easier for this girl to laugh, talk and stand around in small groups at secondary school, where children do not run around as much as they did in primary school. In fact, many students choose to stay in the classroom during breaks. Setting is a deciding quality in children’s ability to adapt to friendships at school. It is described as especially important in secondary school, because the children now are more into hanging out with each other. Hanging out requires being good at small talk, talking about nothing and everything, being a good listener and also a good supporter of your friends. Being in the right place at the right time could be a challenge when using a wheelchair. One of the girls (13 years old) is dependent on an electric wheelchair. She says that at primary school it is easy to be with others. She has a lot of fun gossiping about friends’ attitude towards boys; it is fun when other girls show off to the boys. But in secondary school her classmates started going to each other’s houses during lunch breaks. She says that the school cafeteria is an unpleasant place to be and the food is unhealthy, which explains why so many of her friends choose not to eat there. Another boy (13 years old) confirms that being social, mingling in groups, talking and flirting during lunch breaks is important to building a sense of community with friends. His school has a pleasant cafeteria, regularly visited by the students during lunch breaks. Space and place therefore have a definite impact on disabled children’s ability to be with friends at school.

Discussion

Mutuality, interdependency and open-handed benevolence are key ingredients in a real friendship (Aristotle, 1999). These are key elements when children with disabilities adapt to and choose different types of friends, some of them with disabilities, and some without.

We found that the school structure of spending most of their time with children who are not disabled shapes the ways that children with disabilities adapt to friendship. Norms and reliance on social groups affect friendship, making both children with and without disabilities aware that characteristics of impairment are not always suitable for the situation (Hallberg et al., 2011; Weiserbs and Gottlieb, 1995). Children with disabilities therefore in some sense adapt to different norms due to the risk of being excluded, discriminated against or positioned as different (Gulbrandsen, 2010). The transition to secondary school is of particular concern, when school seems to absorb more time in children’s lives. Some choose to spend more time with local peers who are not disabled, adapting to local activities, which is positive to sustain such friendships (Grue, 2001). Successfully maintaining local friendships allows more time for doing homework, which is important for academic success. However, local friendships require a sense of awareness, being more alike children who are not disabled and finding your place can undermine children’s use of technical and other aids that mark them as different from other children (Gulbrandsen, 2010; Watson et al., 1999).

Close friendships with other children with disabilities can be a sort of relationship that makes you feel more at home, in a setting where awareness of social norms and sophistication are less significant, and how you look and appear does not matter (Hallberg et al., 2011; Weiserbs and Gottlieb, 1995). To feel at home indicates being in a setting where you can feel safe, but it also indicates a family aspect to the situation, which coincides with a philosophical understanding of health (Svenaeus, 2000). Both boys and girls in this study emphasize that it is easier to do sports activities with other children with disabilities, sharing interests and activities over a period of time (De Schauwer et al., 2009; Kalymon et al., 2010). This is an example of what Standahl would call an activity being coloured by shared experiences without a sense of being different (Standahl, 2009). However, spending time with friends who are disabled, sharing interests over time, could also be a risk to developing close local friendships or being excluded from local participation (Kalymon et al., 2010).

One result of this study is the way it illuminates the great impact that digital media has had on modern friendships. Connecting with friends on Facebook could make forming a new relationship easier. Shared interests like Harry Potter World or comics help children to form new friendships. As stated in other research, sharing stories and information and talking with people who understand you is facilitated by the internet (Seymour and Lupton, 2004). Long-distance relationships with friends that a child has met, for example, at a summer camp, but whom they rarely see, can be positively promoted through the use of cell phones and internet. Recent research has shown that the mobile phone is viewed by children as essential to supporting relationships, also minimizing the risk of isolation (Bond, 2010). Talking ‘for hours’ is a form of self-disclosure that can have a positive effect on the formation of friendships (Aristotle, 1999; Peter et al., 2005). This is in concordance with research which states that online instant messaging is positively correlated to the quality of adolescents’ already existing friendships (Valkenburg and Peter, 2009). Our results show that Facebook can also support the formation of new friendships when transitioning from primary to secondary school. However, it should be noted that the use of internet has created the risk of online harassment even though this was not an issue in this study (Mishna et al., 2009).

One quality of friendship is intimacy. Intimacy involves a degree of revealing yourself, your motivations, experiences and personal traits (Kvello, 2006). In our study, girls’ discourse on ‘best friends’ involves sharing secrets – mostly about boys or talking about other girls who are not present. However, when being disabled, sharing equipment and medicine can make a best friend unique and trustworthy. In our study, this sort of unique relationship existed between girls who shared secrets about intimate details involving their diagnosis, things they do not share with friends who are not disabled. This is in keeping with research that shows that best friends are one or two close friends you can trust, be confident with and share experiences with (Kvello, 2006). These are people who respect you for who you are and to whom you can ‘tell everything’ (Helseth and Misvær, 2010; Wendelborg and Kvello, 2010). The quality of trust has also been identified in recent research as the most important characteristic in all friendships among children and adolescents (Kvello, 2006).

Research shows that girls seem to expect more empathic understanding and a higher level of intimacy than boys (Han and Chadsey, 2004). Both boys and girls search for more intimate relations, support and affection as they grow older (Estell et al., 2009; Weiserbs and Gottlieb, 1995). Friendships in early adolescence seem to take on more depth than they had in primary school, and there is a greater need for intimacy and loyalty (Furman and Buhrmester, 1985). This theory is supported by our research with girls in this study.

Our results point to the importance of mutuality and interdependency – being able to do things together and stand up for each other as friends. Informants in this study said that real friendships require that both friends have something to offer within the interdependence of an equal friendship. A friend might help a disabled child with practical things, but in return, the disabled child can, for example, offer humour or invite her friend to join her at the sports club instead of doing sports classes at school. This could be considered a privilege and help establish an interdependent friendship. Receiving and offering practical help seems especially important in boys’ discourse on friendships. But helping or being helped in itself does not require friendship (Weiserbs and Gottlieb, 1995). Offering help often requires functional qualifications. Schools that cater to the needs of children with physical disabilities are therefore essential. From our study it seemed important to offer a pleasant and accessible school. A cafeteria in secondary school is a social place for all children. However, for a child using a wheelchair who cannot go to friends’ houses during lunch hour, the canteen could serve as a place for interacting, developing and sustaining friendships, dependent on physical access to such child-centred spaces (Cocks, 2005; Watson et al., 1999).

Our conclusion is that children with physical disabilities are strongly engaged in adapting to different, but mutual friendships. In our study we have begun to fill a gap in prior research by focusing on disabled children’s competent means of understanding and developing friendships in ‘all directions’. These friendships, however, are not so different from what has been discovered in research on mainstream friendship, according to categories of friendship qualities (Kvello, 2006). Having friends at local schools and in the local environment is of great significance. Therefore, children with physical disabilities try to adapt to norms within this context and what is expected from all children. However, it sometimes feels easier for them to do things with friends who have disabilities, and these types of friends can make you feel more at home. Social media such as the internet, Facebook and cell phones make long-distance friendships easier and also more intimate.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to the children and parents who participated in the study, sharing their unique experiences. The authors would like to acknowledge Kari Opsahl and Bennedichte R Olsen for collaborating and conducting interviews for the study. This article is part of an interdisciplinary research project, Professional Practices and Children’s Participation, at Oslo and Akershus University College (OAUC), which has contributed inspiration and support.

Funding

The study received financial support from the Research Council of Norway (RCN) and Oslo and Akershus University College (OAUC).

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