The advances in information technology have resulted in the presence of social media in everyday life. Adolescents are the most common users of social media. Friendship and peer relations are especially important in this period for quality of life of every adolescent. With popularisation of the social media a new concept has emerged – online friendship. In my research I focused on investigating how quality and quantity of online and offline friendships are related, and how different aspects of friendships are related to social acceptance and social and emotional self-concept in a group of adolescents. A total of 336 eighth and ninth grade students participated in the study. The research methods were: friendship quality questionnaire, sociometric technique, self-concept questionnaire and friendship network questionnaire. The results show that the majority of students have online friends. Online friendships are of greater quantity than offline ones, and the groups overlap. The quality of offline friendship differs from that of online friendship – there are both more positive and more negative characteristics in offline friendship. Students in different sociometric groups differ in levels of constructive offline friendship and quantity of offline friendships. The popular and the rejected group of students are the most distinct. Adolescents with different quantity of offline friendships show differences in social self-concept, but not in emotional self-concept. Students with higher social self-concept have higher quality of offline friendships. There was a positive relationship between online nonconstructive friendship and social self-concept. No significant relationship was found between friendship quality and emotional self-concept.
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