Seeking support or concealing? A longitudinal study of adolescents' friendships, peer victimization, depression, and coping with peer relationship stressors.

Friends are often a source of emotional and informational support, which suggests that friends can directly assist adolescents to more effectively cope with stressful experiences, reducing emotional distress. In this longitudinal study, we examined the direct impact of friendship on adolescents' use of help seeking, comfort seeking, concealment, and rumination to cope with peer stressors. We used path modeling with two waves of data to consider the unique roles of friendship quality and coping on change in peer victimization (both overt and relational/reputational) and depression over time. Gender and age moderation were also examined. Participants were 619 Australian adolescents (Mage = 12.14) who experienced peer victimization in the past year and participated in two surveys over 1 year. In a comprehensive path model, higher quality friendship related to increased comfort-seeking responses to peer stress and decreased overt victimization over time. Regarding coping with peer stressors, comfort seeking was associated with fewer depressive symptoms over time, and concealment and rumination were associated with more overt and relational victimization, as well as increased depressive symptoms. Additionally, adolescents higher in overt victimization decreased help and comfort seeking over time, those higher in relational victimization increased comfort seeking, and those higher in depression increased concealment and rumination over time. Girls reported more problematic responses to peer stressors, and, although effects were small, gender and age moderated some longitudinal associations. Future research is needed to better understand how friendships may influence coping responses, with the aim of supporting adolescents to help each other cope with stress. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).