Adolescence is influenced by an intense engagement in friendships interactions. These interactions create more complex bonds than expected. Social changes cause an evolution in the nature and the dynamics of adolescents' relationships. Those changes create a diversification of relationship types which impact on the adolescent's development. The aim of this study is to analyze the influence of friendship quality on adolescents' academic disengagement, as well as the mediator effect of the value towards school. The psychosocial approach, in which we fit, allowed us to highlight both active and subjective parts of the subject with regards to peers and what do they have to do with school (Malrieu, 1973; Mead, 1963; Wallon, 1941). Thus, in the present study, our aim was to investigate links among adolescents' peer-relationships and their academic engagement. 696 8th grade (middle school) adolescents schooled in France answered a questionnaire. 185 come from disadvantaged schools, and the other 511 from public and private "classic" schools. On the one hand, this questionnaire, studies the academic engagement of the adolescents, through the evaluation of their marks, attention, implication, and school perseverance and also their interest for personal work and success. On the other hand, we were looking for the amount of interest they give to the school according to whether it is seen towards epistemic, future, social or externalized dimensions. A third part is devoted to the quality of peers' relationships in relation to the research of conformity, the capacity to handle the pressure from the peers, social support and loneliness. Our results reveal that an extreme search of conformity is likely to provoke academic disengagement and also jointly supports a report externalized towards the school (strategic and social). On the contrary, loneliness promotes a good scholar investment and epistemic interaction towards the school. Two other dimensions are related to the value given to the school by adolescents. It arises that social support and peer pressure felt by adolescents further academic engagement only if they grant scholar and intellectual knowledge rather than to the detriment of their relationships.
