WHY CAN'T WE BE FRIENDS?

Abstract

This article examines the process of role-making for volunteers who work with teenage mothers. The volunteer role provides an illustration of how the interaction of organizational and individual factors affects the construction of roles. This study seeks to discover the relationship between role definitions and role enactments by focusing on the actors' starting role definitions and the events that influence their subsequent behavior. The author studied volunteers, who were known as family friends, in one program, through participant observation as a volunteer and through 25 in-depth interviews with other volunteers and program personnel. It was found that while the organization had a rather static definition of the family friend role, based on the program's ideology and its original conception of what family friends should do, the volunteers adapted the role to their own experiences. Those who felt that they had fulfilled the role satisfactorily were able to develop close relationships with the young mothers. Those who were not satisfied with their role-making had encountered various barriers that inhibited the development of friendships. The role-making process is thus interactional, shaped not only by structural and organizational conditions but by the responses of others within the setting.