▶ Your Answer : Some people think that friends do not affect as much as other factors to teenagers. However, in my opinion, there is no other factor than friends in influencing them most. This is because teenagers spend most of their time with their friends, and they usually tend to follow their pack of friends. To begin with, teenagers do a lot with their friends. Whether they want or not, they have to study together in school, accept extracurricular classes together and they even play together on weekends. I will talk about my experience as an example. When I was a sophomore in highschool, I had three best friends. As you suppose, we spent our time together not only for group studying, but also eating delicious things and going enjoyable places. Thus, we affected a lot each others. On top of that, teenagers want to be similar with their friends, because they regard them with a reference group. A study was conducted by Board of Korea education to determine whether friends could affect students’ behaviors. The researchers tracked the highschool students of 200 over a 3 year period. What they found was intriguing. An overwhelming 86% of students learned their close friends’ behaviors and did very similar behaviors in their school life. This was generated because of the effect of reference group. Students dimmed their friends to reference group that have to follow, and they gradually fitted their actions to friends such as motions, facial expressions, and voices. This study illustrates that friends have significant effect to teenagers. To sum up, nearly half of a teenagers’ day are made of time with their friends, and it is a nature of them that being a member of their friends. In this regard I think friends are the most influential factor to teenagers. |