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COPYRIGHT 2000 JAI Press, Inc.
INTRODUCTION
It has become a cliche to begin articles on friendship with a discussion of how its definition varies across individuals, as friendship is voluntary and not subject to as many institutional constraints as are family and neighbor relationships. Most researchers who study various aspects of friendship structure and process use one of three approaches to dealing with this definitional variation. They either ignore the complexity, bemoan it because when they compare people's friendships they are inappropriately comparing different entities, or eliminate it by instructing the people they interview to use a limited definition in discussing specific relationships (see Adams 1989, and Matthews 1983, for more detailed discussions of these measurement issues). A much smaller number of researchers examine the variation.
Some of the researchers who studied variation in the definition of friendship have done so indirectly by asking about the importance of sundry of its elements. For example, Parker and de Vries (1993) compared ratings by female and male undergraduate students of the importance of interactional and emotional dimensions of friendship. Shea, Thompson, and Blieszner (1988) asked elderly residents of a rural retirement community to rate the importance within friendship of resources exchanges such as love, status, information, affection, and services. Candy, Troll, and Levy (1981) studied the significance of three functions of friendship: namely, status, power, and intimacy assistance, in a sample of women aged 14 through 80 years.
A few researchers, most of whom studied older adults exclusively, examined definitions of friendship directly by asking their respondents what the relationship means to them. For example, analyzing data from transcriptions of guided conversations with older adults, Matthews (1983) identified two friendship orientations--friends as particular individuals and friends as relationships. When Adams (1986) asked elderly women in suburban Chicago to describe what a friendship is, they tended to define it social psychologically, referring to affective characteristics. Roberto and Kimboko (1989) constructed three categories of friends from the definitions given by older adults living in a western U.S. city--the likeables, the confiders, and the trustables. Based on interviews to determine how elderly people conceptualize friendship, Patterson, Bettini, and Nussbaum (1993) identified nine definitional clusters--devotion, commonality, reciprocity, relational stratification, frequent contact, positive attributions, positive impact, understanding, and familial comparison. De Vries, Dustan, and Wiebe (1994) asked men and women from each of four age groups (20 to 34, 35 to 49, 50 to 64, and 65 and older) to define friendship. They then coded the definitions into a list of categories including self-disclosure, affection or appreciation, assistance, empathetic understanding, ego reinforcement, shared activities, shared interests or values, acceptance, trust, structural features (e.g., time known, frequency of contact), loyalty or commitment, and compatibility (Parker and de Vries 1993). Ego reinforcement, empathetic understanding, structural features, and acceptance were mentioned less frequently than were other aspects.
Gender and Age Effects
Some of the researchers cited above examined age and gender differences in definitions of friendship. For example, Matthews (1983) and Roberto and Kimboko (1989) reported that the older men and women did not differ significantly in their orientations toward friendship. Using Matthews' conceptual distinction, de Vries and colleagues (1994) confirmed this null finding and also reported that, in their sample, the oldest respondents were more likely to include individual references in their definitions. In addition to examining gender differences in Matthews' friendship orientations, these authors explored age and gender differences in the tendency to mention frequently used categories of the Parker and de Vries (1993) typology. Women included a larger number of dimensions than men, but there was no age difference in number of aspects named. With age, men increased their use of affection or appreciation and women decreased theirs. The opposite pattern emerged for loyalty or commitment. Women mentioned self-disclosure more frequently, whereas men mentioned trust more often. Identification of assistance or support decreased with age for men, but not for women; mention of compatibility and shared activities increased with age for women, but not for men.
Age and gender differences in definitions of friendship can be explained structurally or developmentally. Both age stratification and life span development theoretical perspectives suggest that adults' views of social relationships are likely to vary with age, a variable that stands in proxy for social structural position and for level of development (Adams and Blieszner 1994; Blieszner and Adams 1992). If friendship patterns are affected by age, it follows that perceptions of friendship might be as well. In terms of social structure, the older people are, the more likely they are to be retired and, if they reared children, to have an empty nest. Because of their stage of life, they participate in a different set of daily routines and activities than those who are employed or have children living at home. This in turn affects their opportunities to make and keep friends. Other conditions such as health, living arrangements, and finances are likely to affect the impact of retirement and the departure of children from the home on friendship (Allan and Adams 1989). For example, chances to make new friends might be increased or reduced, thus expanding the range of diversity within the friendship circle or compressing it (Adams 1987). The availability of more time might provide opportunities to develop greater closeness among friends or the presence of poor health might constrain interaction and thus lead to reduced closeness (Johnson and Troll 1994).
Developmental maturity, as indexed by age, might also be related to process aspects of friendship definitions. The longer one has lived, the more experience with close relationships a person has probably had, perhaps suggesting great skill with cognitive, affective, and behavioral dynamics of friendship. At the same time, frail health and perceived closeness to death might lead a person to focus more narrowly on just the most intimate of family and friend relationships and might reduce the range of relational behaviors in which the person can engage. The older one is, the greater the potential length of acquaintance among friends. At the same time, due to the health and mobility reasons given above, the older one is, the more likely contact with friends is less frequent and for shorter periods of time.
As with age effects on perceptions of friendship, both structural and dispositional explanations of gender effects can be given (Blieszner and...
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