The effect of peer acceptance, peer friendship, and support for autonomy on students’ need for relatedness with classmates

According to Self-Determination Theory (SDT), one of the major sources of emotional well-being is relatedness with significant others. For students, especially during adolescence, their classmates are the major “significant others”, as at school they spend most of their time with them, experiencing a wide range of peer relationship. Classmates’ social relationships can be defined in terms of the level of acceptance in the class group and the number of friends. So far, few studies have investigated the satisfaction of the need for relatedness and its antecedents with specific references to the group of classmates. The present study has two main objectives. The first is to establish a measurement model for the satisfaction and frustration of the need for relatedness with classmates. The second is to examine the relationships between peer acceptance, peer friendship, support for autonomy provided by the classmates and students’ need for relatedness in the class context. The study was based on a sample of 316 lower-secondary school students and adopted a two-wave design.Results empirically support the hypothesized measurement model of the need for relatedness with classmates which posited two distinct but related factors (satisfaction and frustration). First analyses show that Autonomy support appears to be associated with both satisfaction and frustration, while peer acceptance with need frustration. The longitudinal study is still ongoing, and it will allow to investigate the long-term relationships of peer acceptance, peer friendship, and support for autonomy with students’ need for relatedness.