The Korean Wave: Exploring the Attachment Styles and K-Pop Online and Offline Friendship Relations of Young Adults

Attachment Styles play a crucial role in influencing interpersonal relationships in online and offline platform. Young adults nowadays tend to spend most of their time connecting with their friends, may it be in an online platform or face-to-face interaction. This study was conducted seeking to investigate the correlation between attachment styles and online and offline friendship as well as to know the relationship between attachment styles and friendship relations of young adults. A crucial gap has been identified from an existing research "Parental Attachment and Peer Relationships in Adolescence: A Systematic Review" (Delgado et. al., 2022)” that needs further investigation. In this previous research, online friendship relations remain unexplored as the latter variable mainly focused on offline friendship relations. Thus, differences between online and offline friendship relations will be investigated this study according to attachment styles in order to bridge the gap. Overall, the findings revealed that there is a significant relationship between attachment styles and friendship relations of young adults (r = 21, p < .01), insinuating that individuals who have higher security in their attachment styles tend to have formed positive relationship with their friendships. However, it was found that fearful-avoidant attachment style was less correlated with the friendship dimensions. Contrary to what were hypothesized, it was also revealed that those who are securely attached are inclined towards engaging positively with friendships, no matter whether it is in online or offline platform. Meanwhile, ambivalent, dismissive-avoidant, and fearful-avoidant showed preference towards online platforms. The findings could suggest further research on how fearful-avoidant attachment style influence other interpersonal relationship. Moreover, given the fact that only trust and perceived value have found significant difference between the preferred types of friendship, future researchers may conduct deep exploration of how these dimensions appear and make difference in online and offline friendships.