DEFINITIONS OF FRIENDSHIP IN THE THIRD AGE: Age, Gender, and Study Location Effects By: REBECCA G. ADAMS, ROSEMARY BLIESZNER, and BRIAN DE VRIES

Friendship is not institutionalized in American society; hence, perceptions of it vary. Rather than studying sources of this variation, most scholars ignore the complexity, bemoan the difficulty it causes in analysis, or eliminate it. We examined the frequency of use of previously studied and emergent characteristics of friendship as definitional criteria and the age, gender, and cultural patterns associated with them. Data are from two North American cities: the Andrus Study of Older Adult Friendships in southeastern United States (28 women and 25 men, age 55 to 84), and the Social Relations Project in western Canada (39 women and 25 men, age 55 to 87). Definitions of friendship differed across age and gender groups within each culture, but most striking is cross-cultural variation. Article: INTRODUCTION It has become a cliché 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 Adams 1992). For example, Wright (1982) described women's friendships as face-to-face and men's friendship as side-by-side, capturing the tendency of women to share emotional experiences and men to share activities. This could be because women have more opportunities to establish and maintain emotionally close friendships than men do. A dispositional explanation is equally plausible. Perhaps due to differential socialization or inherent psychological predispositions, women are more inclined to establish emotionally close relationships than men are. Whatever the explanation, the tendency of women to verbalize their feelings may lead them to emphasize the affective qualities of friendship in their definitions, whereas the tendency of men to share activities with each other may lead them to emphasize the amount of time they spend together and other proxy measures of shared activities. The differing social structural locations and dispositions of men and women together may account for a wide range of differences in their friendship patterns and thus in their perceptions of friendship. Effects of Geographic Location Although, as the examples we cited earlier illustrate, some researchers examined age and gender differences in definitions of friendship, none of them investigated whether variations in cultural context also affect the meaning of friendship or even considered how the cultural context in which their respondents lived might have shaped their perceptions. This is not surprising, because a thorough study of cultural variations in definitions of friendship would require a large sample, but friendship researchers have typically not had adequate funding to conduct such a study. Not only would a larger sample size than is typical for friendship studies be required, but administering open-ended questions and processing the responses to them is also time consuming and thus expensive (see Adams 1989, for a table of sample sizes in friendship research). In addition, the complexity and lack of clarity of the concept of culture may partially account for its absence in friendship research. The terms ethnicity, culture, and even race are often confused or used interchangeably (Betancourt and Lopez 1993). Nonetheless, some preliminary empirical observations about the effects of culture on friendship can be offered. In their examination of the social networks of both urban native and nonnative elders, Strain and Chappell (1989) found that native elders reported a greater number of friends with whom they had more frequent contact. Penning and Chappell (1987) compared British, French, German, Ukrainian/Russian, and Jewish ethnic elders and found no difference in the average number of friends, but a greater likelihood of the identification of one close friend for French and German respondents. De Vries, Jacoby, and Davis (1996) compared British, French, European, and a multiethnic group of older Canadians on the dimensions of friendship number, contact, and satisfaction. They found that the French identified fewer friends, lived closer to and had greater contact with their friends, and tended to be somewhat more satisfied with their friendships as compared to the other groups of respondents. Together, these results, corroborating the other investigations cited, suggest cultural differences in friendship meaning and interaction patterns. In this article, as a preliminary step in studying cultural variation in definition of friendship, we compare the findings from two independently conducted small studies of older adult friendship in different geographic locations: Adams and Blieszner gathered data for the Andrus Study of Older Adult Friendship Patterns in Greensboro, North Carolina, and de Vries collected the Social Relations Project data in Vancouver, British Columbia. Greensboro is part of a triad of cities comprising Greensboro, Highpoint, and Winston-Salem in north central North Carolina. These cities, together with Burlington, made up a 1990 Census, Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) of about one million residents, 59 percent of whom lived in urban areas. The population of Greensboro itself was about 184,000. The region has long been a major center for the textiles, furniture, and tobacco industries. Located therein are numerous universities and colleges. Vancouver is located on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. The city of Vancouver, proper, has a population of approximately 500,000 residents, although it is also the center of the greater Vancouver regional district (GVRD; comprising over a dozen municipalities), which has an overall population of approximately 1.6 million. The GVRD is most noted for tourism and shipping; it also houses many of the offices for the provinces' central industries of mining and lumber. Two of the provinces' largest public universities are located in the GVRD, in addition to numerous colleges. Although Greensboro is representative of smaller cities as compared to Vancouver, it is embedded in a network of metropolitan communities with a population almost as large. We assume, then, that any differences found in the combined data are more likely to come from cultural sources than from demographic structural ones such as size, density, and homogeneity of the population. Although this article is not the appropriate forum for an explication of the various dimensions on which Canadians and Americans might be both similar and different, it may be said that, in relative contrast to the individualism and independence of citizens of the United States, Canadians may be seen as somewhat more communal and interdependent. This difference, should it exist, may manifest itself in a preference for affective and cognitive dimensions on the part of Canadians; that is, the welfare of another implicates the welfare of the self in more communal settings. In addition, Vancouver is in a more recently settled area of North America than Greensboro. This regional difference perhaps manifests itself in a social organization more influenced by tradition, greater structure, and more established norms governing social interaction in Greensboro than in Vancouver. These cultural differences might lead to different friendship patterns and different perceptions of what friendship means. Building on previous work, in this article we examine older adults' definitions of friendship and how they vary by age group, gender, and cultural context. After discussing the samples and measures used, we report on the frequency with which older adults in these two settings mentioned various aspects of friendships as part of their definitions, and then examine age, gender, and cultural similarities and differences in their perceptions of friendship.