Abstract:

Numerous researches in the Educational Sciences field, which aim to identify the way in which adolescents understand the peculiarities of the age they go through, talk about the role of groups of friends in identifying the answers to the questions and searches they have related to their own becoming, to the stages of claiming a new axiological identity, with increasingly polarized particularities, to the need to turn inward or to reconsider some moral values. The present research aims to identify the connection between the elements of a set of moral values and certain characteristics of the friendship relationships of adolescents, starting from the essential role that the relationship with friends has at this age. Research data show that establishing strong friendship relationships is a difficult process, also during the adolescence, so we are not surprised that in our research, through a questionnaire administered to over 1000 high school students, we noticed the trend towards the quantitative dimension of friendship relationships, manifested both in the number of friends and in the duration of friendship. In the list of moral values chosen by students from a large list of values, which also included religious and civic values, we considered to be important those strongly related to the age of adolescence, such as: the power to make the right decisions (called by us wisdom), courage, self-control, justice. Research data reveal that the choice of moral values in adolescents does not depend on the number of friends. On the three levels of analysis, on groups smaller than 5 friends, between 6-10 friends and larger than 10 friends, there are no differences greater than five percentage points for any of the moral values from the list we have suggested. From the four moral values, high school students value justice the most (m = 72.25%). However, there is a relativization of the seriousness of some facts in the moral sphere, depending on the size of the group of friends. We mention here, in the descending order of seriousness of the facts, about: attacks on human dignity through violence, trafficking in human beings, rape, non-compliance with the law in order to become very well positioned socially, the desire to gain without work, the lack of total sincerity, success to the detriment or at the expense of others, theft of the intellect by copying, the desire for power in belonging groups, the desire to achieve quick success with minimal effort, the help given to someone in order to gain their trust or subsequently ask them for a favor. However, there are differences of more than 5 percentage points in the sense of decreasing their severity for high school students with a large extension of the group of friends. The personal choice for moral values is influenced by the duration of friendship, being more present in the case of friendship relationships with a shorter duration. The conclusions of the research highlight that the relationship between moral values and friendship between adolescents is one that reflects the crisis situation they are going through, but also the importance of belonging to a group of friends.

Keywords:

Values, moral options, adolescence, group of friends, friendship duration.