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The importance of peers in influencing young people's decisions has long been recognized by both local youth programs (e.g., through schools and social service agencies) and national campaigns (e.g., Just Say No) established to prevent behavior that is potentially dangerous to the youths and to others. Although teaching youths how to resist peer pressure to engage in behavior that they would otherwise reject is important, it may also be advantageous to teach young people how to form friendships in which negative peer pressure would be minimized. Such relationships would be based on mutual trust, respect, and caring (Youniss & Smollar, 1985), thus enabling the youths to feel a greater sense of equality in the friendship (Berndt & Savin-Williams, 1993; Furman & Robbins, 1985), which minimizes unwanted influence. The extent to which these attributes characterize youths' friendships varies, and the factors in young people's lives that are likely to be associated with their establishment of such friendships has yet to be fully identified. The purpose of this article is to identify characteristics of young people and their families that are important to the establishment of strong best friend ships. Although a number of researchers have examined the impact of individual and familial factors on youths' peer relationships (Cohn, 1990; Dekovic & Janssens, 1992; Dishion, 1990; Gold & Yanof, 1985; Lewis & Feiring, 1989; Patterson, Kupersmidt, & Griesle, 1990; Putallaz, 1987; Roff, Sells, & Golden, 1972; Winder & Rau, 1962), most have taken a bivariate approach, with youths' popularity within their school classrooms as the outcome. In the present study, we examined the predictive links between youths' individual temperaments, several of the relationship systems within their families, and the quality of their best friendships. We used a structural equation modeling technique in order to consider both the direct and indirect effects of the different predictors. We were particularly interested in the contribution of youths' sibling relationships to those factors that predict strong best friendships. In several studies (Abramovitch, Corter, Pepler, & Stanhope, 1986; Berndt & Bulleit, 1985; East & Rook, 1992; Stocker & Dunn, 1990; Vandell, Minnett, Johnson, & Santrock, cited in Dunn & McGuire, 1992), researchers have considered the link between youths' sibling and peer relationships; however, the findings regarding both the magnitude and role of that link have been inconsistent. In the present study, we looked beyond the direct effects of youths' sibling relationships on their best friendships, hypothesizing that youths' sibling relationships may assume a mediating role in which youths translate their familial experiences into behaviors that are generalized to interactions with age mates outside the home. THE CONCEPTUAL MODEL We tested a social learning model (Patterson, 1986) in which children learn specific interaction patterns in their relationships with other family members, which are then generalized to their peer relations. Thus, we expected the quality of youths' best friendships to be positively associated with warmth, and negatively associated with conflict, in their sibling relationships. We also examined the mediational role that youths' sibling relationships play in the links between the quality of their best friendships and several individual and family variables: youths' temperaments, the quality of their relationships with their parents, and their exposure to conflict in their parents' marital relationship. Figure 1 presents the conceptual model that we tested and the predicted relations among the constructs. (Figure 1 omitted) Sibling relationship quality. Sibling relationships provide children and adolescents with experiences that are different from those they have with both parents and peers (Azmitia & Hesser, 1993; Brody, Stoneman, & MacKinnon; 1982; Whiting & Whiting, 1975). …
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