Friendship: Structure and Context

Abstract

Although since the days of Aristotle, Cicero, and Plato philosophers have been pondering the qualities of ideal friendship, proposing typologies of categories and functions of friendship, and analyzing the role of friendship in maintaining a stable society, very few sociologists conducted empirical research focused specifically on friendship before the late 1960s (for an exception, see Williams 1959). The friendship literature has thus developed during a scholarly period in which interdisciplinary collaboration has been more common than in the past. Nonetheless, cooperation on friendship research across disciplines has been rare, and while psychologists and communications scholars have mainly studied dyadic processes, sociologists and anthropologists have focused their research on network structure. Much of the early work in both of these traditions focused on individual variations in friendship patterns, but psychologists were concerned with how psychological disposition shaped what happened in friendship dyads, while sociologists were concerned with how social structural location affected friendship network structure. More recently there has been a general concern in the friendship literature about how context shapes relationships (Blieszner & Adams 1992; Adams & Allan 1998). Sociologists, then, have contributed to the friendship literature by examining how friendships vary according to individuals’ locations in the social structure, studying the structural characteristics of friendship networks, and theorizing about how friendships are affected by the contexts in which they are embedded.