research paper about friendship

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Friendship importance around the world: links to cultural factors, health, and well-being.

• 1 Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology, Columbia University, New York, NY, United States
• 2 Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, United States

Prioritizing friendship is associated with many health and well-being benefits. However, to date, there have been relatively few studies that have examined cultural moderators of the link between friendship and important outcomes. In other words, is prioritizing friendships more beneficial in some contexts than others? In the current study, we examined how culture- and country-level factors were associated with the importance people place on friendships and the benefits derived from this importance. The sample comprised of 323,200 participants ( M = 40.79 years, SD = 16.09 years) from 99 countries from the World Values Survey. Multilevel analyses revealed that women, people with higher levels of education, and people living in countries that are more economically equal and high in indulgence placed more value on friendships. Prioritizing friendships in life was associated with better health and well-being, but these associations depended on many cultural factors. The findings are discussed in the context of the ways in which friendships can enrich health and well-being across different settings.

Introduction

Friendships enrich our lives in many ways. Friends give us both practical and emotional support when we need it. As a result, there are many emotional and physical health benefits of friendships—the more people prioritize friendships, the happier and healthier they are. Moreover, broader cultural contexts can have large influences on how friendships function and are expressed. Therefore, the benefits that people accrue from friendships might also vary across cultures. In the current study, we examined how the importance people place on friendships varies across cultures and whether this variation is associated with differences in the health and well-being of the people living in those cultures.

The Role of Friendship in Health and Happiness

There is a reliable link between social support and mental and physical health across the lifespan ( Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010 , 2015 ; Holt-Lunstad, 2017 ), and one important source of support is our friends. Friends provide us with a strong sense of companionship, mitigate feelings of loneliness ( Lykes and Kemmelmeier, 2014 ), and contribute to our self-esteem and life satisfaction ( Goodwin and Hernandez Plaza, 2000 ; Chopik, 2017 ). Perceiving greater support from friends is associated with a greater sense of purpose and control over one’s life ( Veiel and Baumann, 1992 ; Leary et al., 1995 ). In terms of predicting health, friendship occasionally predicts health to an equivalent and, in some cases, larger degree compared to spousal and parent–child relationships ( Bearman and Moody, 2004 ; Giles et al., 2005 ; Christakis and Fowler, 2007 ). Friends also help individuals institute healthy behaviors in their own lives. For example, seeing a friend trying to lose weight is associated with an individual’s commitment to maintaining a healthy weight ( Wing and Jeffery, 1999 ; Gorin et al., 2005 ).

However, friendship is not universally good for individuals—depression and negative health behaviors can also spread through friend networks ( Smith and Christakis, 2008 ; Rosenquist et al., 2011 ). For instance, the risk of obesity, suicide, smoking, and other forms of substance abuse increase dramatically when surrounded by peers who are obese and/or suicidal, smoke, and abuse substances ( Urberg et al., 1997 ; Andrews, 2002 ; Bearman and Moody, 2004 ; Christakis and Fowler, 2007 ). In sum, friends play a significant role in people’s mental and physical well-being, for better and for worse. Nevertheless, the degree to which people value and benefit from friendship may differ across settings and cultures. In other words, different country-level factors might predict how much people value friendships and, in turn, the benefits that people obtain from friendships.

Do Friendships Vary Across Countries?

Some form of friendship is present in nearly all cultures and countries ( Cohen, 1966 ), but friendships are perceived and constructed differently across cultures ( Baumgarte, 2016 ). While some cultures employ a looser definition of friendship, others are stricter in the ways they define friendship ( Stewart and Bennett, 1991 ; Goodwin, 1999 ). Based on how people define friendship, there is accompanying variance in how many friends people have and what people expect from friends. For instance, a cross-national study in friendship found that Americans were more likely to have more friends and differentiate between friends; Ghanaians were more cautious toward friends and having a large group of friends ( Adams and Plaut, 2003 ). Likewise, people’s understanding of intimacy in friendship varies across cultures ( Keller, 2004a ). Compared to Chinese adolescents, Western adolescents emphasize more on relationship intimacy and quality interactions in their friendships ( Keller et al., 1998 ; Keller, 2004b ). In addition, friendships are more stable and fixed in some societies and more flexible and relationships of choice in other societies. In the latter case, relationships can change more rapidly as people have the freedom to voluntarily choose relationships (i.e., higher relational mobility). As a result, people tend to trust strangers more and are more proactive in maintaining friends, self-disclosing, and provide more support ( Schug et al., 2010 ; Thomson et al., 2018 ). These behaviors are characteristic of friendships in individualistic cultures, as individualistic cultures possess higher relational mobility ( Kito et al., 2017 ).

There are also several country-level (e.g., gross domestic product) and individual factors (e.g., gender) that might explain differences in how people define and value friendships and the benefits that people accrue from friendships. However, there have been almost no large-scale examinations of cross-cultural differences in friendship processes. As a result, in the present study, we took a largely exploratory approach to how country-level factors might alter whether people value friendships in their lives. Research has established different dimensions for social and cultural constructs. One such framework is Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, which consists of six national constructs through which countries organize themselves ( Hofstede et al., 2010 ). Although there are many dimensions on which cultures vary, we elected to focus primarily on the Hofstede dimensions given the great breadth of research on their links to health, well-being, and social behavior and characteristics identified in past research. However, we do run some supplementary analyses examining other taxonomies of cultural dimensions.

Below, we briefly discuss the concept of friendship importance and ways in which friendships might vary across country-level factors that have been traditionally studied by researchers (e.g., gross domestic product, income inequality, Hofstede’s cultural dimensions) and how these factors might influence the effects of friendships on health and well-being. Specifically, for each factor, we review its links with well-being and speculate how it might influence friendship importance and interact with friendship importance to predict well-being.

Friendship Importance

Previous studies have found that friends are important for personal well-being. However, there is little research that explicitly explores the effect of valuing friendship on important life outcomes, like well-being and life satisfaction. Instead, friendship researchers have examined the number of friends ( Ho, 2016 ), quality of friendship ( Demir et al., 2012 ), best friends ( Demir and Özdemir, 2010 ), and support from friends ( Secor et al., 2017 ). However, there is variation in how people define friendship, define closeness and support, and define what kind of friends they might have ( Miche et al., 2013 ; Baumgarte, 2016 ). Our study utilizes a different way of thinking about friendship—how much people value friendship (i.e., friendship importance). Values direct people’s thoughts and behaviors toward efforts that they consider important ( Kluckhohn, 1951 ; Rokeach, 1973 ; Schwartz, 1992 ), so this broad measure may capture people having good friends, receiving and giving social support to friends, and interacting with friends, but is not so specific that it would confuse people from different cultures.

People might devote more resources to their friends and have higher quality relationships if they value friends and find them important ( Roberts et al., 2005 ). Or people might find friends important because they have high quality relationship and their friends hold vital roles in their lives. Indeed, there is some evidence that when friendships are evaluated as important, people experience well-being benefits. For example, feeling committed to the role of being a friend is positively related to life satisfaction, even when controlling for ostensibly more detailed measures of social network involvement (e.g., support network density; Siebert et al., 1999 ). Thus, we are treating friendship importance—the degree to which people find friends important and value them—as a proxy for how much people investing in friendships and likely how good friendships are. However, we do acknowledge that specificity is lost in this trade-off for an increased understanding of the instrument across cultural settings. Although there are relatively few studies that investigated how valuing friendship might influence their behaviors and important life outcomes, a previous study using the World Values Survey found that friendship importance predicted better health and happiness while controlling for family importance ( Chopik, 2017 ). However, several country-level factors might predict how people value friendship and the extent to which friendship importance is associated with health and well-being. In the sections below, we provide a short introduction to the country-level factors that we focused on in the current study.

Gross Domestic Product

Gross domestic product (GDP) reflects a country’s economic status, and richer societies often have a higher GDP. With improvements in national GDP, citizens benefit from decreased child labor, lower rates of unemployment, increased school attendance, upgrades in transportation and healthcare services, and other improvements in infrastructure ( Moniruzzaman and Andersson, 2008 ; Muazzam and Nasrullah, 2011 ). Greater GDP is associated with country-level health indicators, including reductions in child and all-cause mortality rates ( Ward and Viner, 2017 ), as well as increases in the amount and variety of opportunities for individuals to attain their personal goals and pursue their interests ( Clark and Senik, 2011 ). Importantly, GDP is positively associated with life engagement, one of the indicators of subjective well-being ( Hill et al., 2019 ). On the one hand, because lower GDP often portends several life difficulties (e.g., health, quality of life of individuals from low-GDP countries may have more stressful relationships—an association often seen at the individual level with socioeconomic status; Veenstra, 2000 ). On the other hand, social networks are a protective factor against stress for people living in low- and middle-income countries ( Perkins et al., 2015 ). Therefore, we expect that lower GDP might be associated with people valuing friendships less. However, among people who do value friendship, lower GDP might have a less negative impact on life outcomes because valuing friendships might offset the negative effects of local economic conditions.

Income Inequality

The GINI index of income inequality measures a nation’s unequal distribution of wealth among its citizens ( Central Intelligence Agency, 2011 ). Overall, quality of life is higher in countries with lower levels of inequality: people are happier, more satisfied, and report greater purpose in life ( Oishi et al., 2011 ; Pickett and Wilkinson, 2015 ; Cheung, 2018 ; Hill et al., 2019 ). Income inequality is associated with increased all-cause and communicable disease mortality ( Ward and Viner, 2017 ). It may be that, in unequal societies where differences in social status, power, and wealth are more prominent and many social relations are vertical, people value horizontal relationships like friendship more for its focus on reciprocity and sharing ( Wilkinson, 1999 ). Alternatively, it could be the case that societies with more inequality value friendships less—the salient financial inequality might alter the things that people value in their lives (e.g., they might think it is more important to spend their time working harder to get ahead or meet people with a higher status rather than spend time with peers and friends). Nonetheless, like GDP, even under high income inequality, valuing friendships might buffer against the negative effects of income inequality on health and well-being via the benefits that people receive from friends’ support ( Wilkinson, 1999 ; Perkins et al., 2015 ).

Power Distance

The extent to which individuals with less power accept inequalities in control and influence, defined as a country’s power distance index (PDI), is associated with subjective well-being at a national level ( Ye et al., 2015 ; Karibayeva and Kunanbayeva, 2018 ). In close relationships, power differences between relational partners oftentimes predict commitment to a relationship, how they make decisions in various domains, and how they express dominance behaviors while interacting with each other ( Dunbar and Burgoon, 2005 ; Farrell et al., 2015 ). However, it is unclear whether PDI would predict how much people value friendships and whether PDI enhances or diminishing the positive effects of valuing friendships.

Individualism/Collectivism

Individualistic countries prefer the preservation and championing of individual freedoms and more diffuse social networks; collectivist countries prefer closely bonded social (often familial) networks and interpersonal harmony ( Hofstede, 1984 ; Triandis, 1995 ; Keller et al., 1998 ). As a result, people from individualistic cultures rated the lack of interaction with friends as their main source of loneliness, and people from collectivist cultures rated the poor quality of familial relationships and communication as the main sources of their loneliness ( Lykes and Kemmelmeier, 2014 ). However, this is not to say that collectivism would be linked with lower friendship importance. People from individualistic cultures tend to report having more friends, show less caution toward friends, and feel sorry for those without friends, which might imply a positive association between individualism and valuing friendships ( Adams, 2005 ). Although individualism/collectivism has been the most extensively studied cultural factor in friendship research, the number of studies is still small and these studies occasionally find no differences between individualistic and collectivistic cultures, especially after childhood (e.g., Keller et al., 1998 ). Further, research to date often compares how friendship processes differ between only two countries, ignoring the diversity of individualism/collectivism across other countries around the world and other factors beyond individualism/collectivism that might account for differences between two countries. Therefore, in the current study, we explore several countries that vary across the individualism/collectivism spectrum and examine its influence on the degree to which people value friendship and benefit from doing so.

Masculinity vs. Femininity

Masculinity corresponds to being more assertive, more interested in the acquisition of status and resources, and a lower focus on the care and affection of others ( Holleran et al., 1988 ). Assertiveness is a social skill that allows people to communicate directly with others about their desires ( Arrindell and Van der Ende, 1985 ) and indirectly leads to increases in subjective well-being and general positivity ( Argyle and Lu, 1990 ; Lauriola and Iani, 2017 ). However, assertiveness and masculinity are not exclusively beneficial for people’s health and well-being. For example, self-reliance and independence are associated with fewer medical checkups, which may translate into poorer health outcomes ( Calasanti, 2004 ; Springer and Mouzon, 2011 ). In the context of friendship, people in masculine societies might be more self-reliant and do not depend on or value friendships as much. Because there have been no large-scale comparisons of friendship processes between more masculine and feminine cultures, we did not make formal hypotheses about how masculinity/femininity would be associated with the importance people place on friendship.

Uncertainty Avoidance

Uncertainty and ambiguity in situations can be a source of stress and threat that impede people’s well-being ( Roll et al., 2015 ). At the country level, the Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI) describes a country’s intolerance for uncertainty and instability ( Hofstede, 1984 ). Societies that tend to avoid uncertainty are characterized by more anxiety and aggression aimed at achieving stability and predictability in their society. On the one hand, higher levels of uncertainty avoidance may be associated with lower levels of health, happiness, and well-being due to countries having characteristically higher levels of anxiety ( Voshaar et al., 2015 ). Because friends provide support for individuals, valuing friendships may alleviate concerns about uncertainty by leading people to seek support from friends that may provide some certainty ( Hitlin and Piliavin, 2004 ). Therefore, high uncertainty avoidance may be associated with valuing friendships because they serve this comforting role. On the other hand, uncertainty avoidance could motivate a society toward investing in solutions and policies that introduce predictability and ultimately enrich people’s lives rather than leaving its citizens to be comforted by members of their social network. As a result, friendships might not be particularly important for or linked with UAI.

Long-Term Orientation

Long-term orientation refers to the set of beliefs and behaviors aimed at cultivating long-term desirable outcomes ( Hofstede, 2001 ). For example, people who endorse a long-term orientation are more willing to sacrifice current satisfaction and pleasure for long-term outcomes ( O’Keefe, 2002 ). Several studies suggest that resistance to consumption and valuing long-term goals lead to greater well-being among individuals and more sustainable societies ( Sheth et al., 2011 ; Chua et al., 2015 ). In addition, people are usually more willing to sacrifice for and cooperate with their friends when they expect reciprocity from their friends in the future ( Van Lange et al., 1997 ; Van Lange and Joireman, 2008 ). Maintaining long-term committed relationships strengthens physical and psychological well-being ( Dush and Amato, 2005 ; Loving and Slatcher, 2013 ). Given the long-term benefits of friendships, we might expect long-term orientation to be linked with placing higher importance in friendships.

Indulgence vs. Restraint

Indulgence refers to the extent to which societies allow for the gratification of basic and natural human desires ( Hofstede, 2011 ). A more indulgent society allows for free expression and engagement in these desires; a more restrained society imposes social norms as a means to restrict the gratification of these desires. Research in marketing suggests that indulgent consumption is one source from which people derive pleasure and happiness ( Haws and Poynor, 2008 ; Hagtvedt and Patrick, 2009 ). On the other hand, indulgence sometimes activates negative emotions, such as guilt and regret ( Kivetz and Simonson, 2002 ; Keinan et al., 2016 ). A country high in indulgence may encourage individuals to engage in pleasurable activities, which would result in reduced stress and better health ( Petersen et al., 2018 ). To our knowledge, no research to date has examined indulgence versus restraint predicting friendship characteristics. However, individuals who feel free to engage in pleasurable activities (i.e., in an indulgent society), like spending time with friends, might value and even benefit from friendships more.

The Current Study

The current study assessed the importance people place on friendships, health, happiness, and subjective well-being in a sample of 323,200 participants from 99 countries. We focused on two questions: first, which individual- and country-level factors are associated with variation in friendship importance across countries? Second, what individual and country-level factors might interact with friendship importance to predict health and well-being? Is valuing friendships particularly beneficial in some countries compared to others? Many of our questions were exploratory—little research existed to guide our hypotheses beyond a select few studies examining differences between individualistic and collectivistic countries and comparing two countries ( Keller et al., 1998 ; Kito, 2005 ; Lykes and Kemmelmeier, 2014 ; Baumgarte, 2016 ). The results from the current study can shed light on how cultural contexts affect friendships and the benefits that individuals accrue from them.

Materials and Methods

Participants and procedure.

Participants were 323,200 individuals (51.7% female) from the World Values Survey (WVS; see Inglehart et al., 2008 ). Since 1981, the WVS has interviewed representative national samples of several different countries all around the world. Information on publications, findings, methodology, and free data access are available at http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org . For the current study, data from waves 1 to 5 of the WVS were aggregated, and 99 different countries are represented in the current report (see Figure 1 for country coverage). Sample sizes ranged from 400 (Dominican Republic) to 15,088 (South Africa), with an average sample size of 3,265 ( SD = 2,479). The overall sample ranged in age from 15 to 99 ( M = 40.79 years, SD = 16.09 years); the median level of education was some secondary education. Each decade of life was well represented (e.g., 15–19 years: 17,139; 20–29 years: 79,948; 30–39 years: 71,689; 40–49 years: 59,919; 50–59 years: 44,318; 60–69 years: 30,889; 70 + years: 19,298); consistent demographic information on participants across cultures was limited to age, gender, and education.

Figure 1. Ratings of friendship importance from 99 countries.

Because we analyzed an existing data source, the Michigan State Institutional Review Board considered this research exempt from ethical oversight, as it did not constitute human subjects research (IRB# STUDY00002967).

Country-Level Characteristics

Country-level GDP per capita ( n = 93 countries had available data; Central Intelligence Agency, 2011 ) and the GINI index of income inequality ( n = 88 countries had available data; Central Intelligence Agency, 2011 ) were gathered as country-level characteristics that measure the economic conditions of a country.

Hofstede’s dimensions of cultural variation were also included in the analysis. Hofstede et al. (2010) suggest that country-level differences in societal values can be characterized by six dimensions.

Power Distance (PDI) measures the degree to which a culture is accepting of inequality. Individualism/collectivism (IDV) refers to the degree to which people prefer loosely knit social networks and individuality (individualism; higher values) versus tightly knit social networks and interdependence with others (collectivism; lower values). Masculinity/Femininity (MAS) assesses the degree to which a culture can be characterized by assertiveness and competitiveness (masculinity; higher values) or nurturance and cooperation (femininity; lower scores). Uncertainty Avoidance (UAI) measures the degree to which a country’s citizens are uncomfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity. Long-Term Orientation (LTO) assesses the outlook of a culture; countries with a long-term orientation place more importance on the future. Indulgence vs. restraint (IVR) refers to the degree to which a society allows free gratification of basic and natural human drives related to enjoyment of life (relative to a suppression of gratification of needs by strict social norms).

Scores on each of these dimensions were gathered from Hofstede’s latest reporting on cultural dimensions ( Hofstede et al., 2010 ). Country-level scores on all of the dimensions were available for 57 countries in the current analyses (and for a total of 83 and 85 countries for long-term orientation and indulgence vs. restraint, respectively).

Participants were asked to indicate how important friends were in their lives on a scale ranging from 1 ( very important ) to 4 ( not at all important ). Scores were recoded such that higher values reflected more importance placed on friendships. Worth noting, participants were asked about relational values only in waves 2–5. 1

Self-Rated Health

Health was assessed at each wave with a single item, “All in all, how would you describe your state of health these days?” Participants rated their health on a scale ranging from 1 ( very good ) to 4 ( poor ). Responses were reverse-scored so that higher values reflected better self-rated health. Numerous studies have shown that self-rated health measures are strong predictors of mortality ( Idler and Benyamini, 1997 ; Schnittker and Bacak, 2014 ).

Happiness and Subjective Well-Being

Happiness was measured with a single item, “Taking all things together, would you say you are…” Participants rated their happiness on a scale ranging from 1 ( very happy ) to 4 ( not at all happy ). Responses were reverse scored so that higher values reflected more happiness. Subjective well-being was measured with a single item, “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?” Participants responded to this item on a 10-point scale ranging from 1 ( completely dissatisfied ) to 10 ( completely satisfied ).

What Is Associated With Variation in Friendship Importance Across Countries?

Because respondents were nested within countries, a multilevel model predicting friendship importance was created, using the SPSS MIXED procedure ( Peugh and Enders, 2005 ). Participant age, participant gender (−1 = male, 1 = female), education, and country-level variables (i.e., GDP, GINI, PDI, IDV, MAS, UAI, LTO, IVR; see table notes) were entered as predictors of friendship importance across countries. 2 All continuous individual and country-level variables were grand-mean centered for these analyses. The country-level standing on friendship importance can be seen in Figure 1 . Results from this multilevel model are presented in Table 1 . Older adults valued friendship less compared to younger adults. Women, people with higher levels of education, and people from countries low in inequality and high in indulgence placed higher importance on friendship in their lives. GDP, power distance, individualism/collectivism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term orientation did not significantly predict friendship importance.

Table 1. Multilevel models predicting friendship values.

Do Individual- and Country-Level Constructs Moderate the Association Between Friendship Importance and Health, Happiness, and Subjective Well-Being? 3

Because respondents were nested within countries, three multilevel models (for health, happiness, and subjective well-being) were created, using the SPSS MIXED procedure ( Peugh and Enders, 2005 ). Participant age, participant gender (−1 = male, 1 = female), friendship importance, education, and country-level variables (i.e., GDP, GINI, PDI, IDV, MAS, UAI, LTO, IVR) were entered as predictors of each outcome across countries. 4 Further, all possible interactions between individual- and country-level variables with friendship importance were also modeled. All continuous individual and country-level variables were grand-mean centered for these analyses.

Results from these multilevel models are presented in Table 2 (for health), Table 3 (for happiness), and Table 4 (for subjective well-being).

Table 2. Multilevel models predicting health.

Table 3. Multilevel models predicting happiness.

Table 4. Multilevel models predicting subjective well-being.

Valuing friendship was associated with better health across cultures (see Table 2 ). People reported worse health if they were older, women, less educated, and from countries lower in GDP, lower in indulgence, and higher in uncertainty avoidance.

There were many instances in which the link between valuing friendship and health was moderated by individual- or country-level variables. Specifically, there were significant two-way interactions between friendship importance and age, gender, education, power distance, individualism, masculinity, and long-term orientation. The simple slopes of each of these effects on health at high (+1 SD ) and low friendship importance (−1 SD ) are presented in Table 5 . Friendship importance was more strongly related to health among older adults, women, people with less education, and people from countries higher in power distance, individualism, femininity, and long-term orientation.

Table 5. Analyses decomposing the effect of friendship importance at 1 SD above and below the mean of a moderator.

Valuing friendship was associated with greater happiness across cultures (see Table 3 ). People reported lower happiness if they were older, male, less educated, and from countries lower in GDP, higher in individualism, higher in uncertainty avoidance, more restrained, and higher in long-term orientation.

There were many instances in which the effects of friendship importance on happiness were moderated by individual- or country-level variables. Specifically, there were significant two-way interactions between friendship importance and age, gender, education, power distance, and individualism. The simple slopes of each of these effects on happiness at high (+1 SD ) and low friendship importance (−1 SD ) are presented in Table 5 . Friendship importance was more strongly related to happiness among older adults, women, people with less education, and people from countries higher in power distance and individualism.

Subjective Well-Being

Valuing friendship was associated with higher levels of subjective well-being across cultures (see Table 4 ). People reported lower subjective well-being if they were younger, male, less educated, and from countries lower in GDP, higher in inequality, higher in power distance, higher in individualism, higher in uncertainty avoidance, and higher in long-term orientation.

There were many instances in which the effects of friendship importance on subjective well-being were moderated by individual- or country-level variables. Specifically, there were significant two-way interactions between friendship importance and age, gender, education, inequality, individualism, uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation, and indulgence. The simple slopes of each of these effects on subjective well-being at high (+1 SD ) and low friendship importance (−1 SD ) are presented in Table 5 . Friendship importance was more strongly related to subjective well-being among older adults, women, people with less education, and people from countries higher in inequality, individualism, uncertainty, in long-term orientation, and restraint. 5

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between country-level factors, valuing friendship, and people’s health, happiness, and subjective well-being. By analyzing data from the WVS, we captured a considerable number of individuals from a considerable number of countries from all around the world. The current report is the most comprehensive examination to date of how cultural factors affect the importance people place on friendships and how they benefit from them.

Older adults, women, people with higher levels of education, and people living in countries high in indulgence and lower income inequality placed a higher value on friendship. Several country-level factors—GDP, power distance, individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term orientation—did not predict how much value people placed on friendship. Similar to previous work, placing importance on friendships was strongly associated with better health, greater happiness, and higher levels of subjective well-being. Several individual- and country-level factors interacted with friendship importance to predict each outcome. Across all the outcomes, friendship importance was more strongly related to health and happiness among older adults, women, people with lower levels of education, and people living in individualistic cultures. A few additional moderators were also present, suggesting greater effects of friendship importance on the outcomes in countries higher in power distance, femininity, uncertainty, restraint, and long-term orientation. However, these moderation effects were not as consistent across the outcomes.

Although we took a largely exploratory approach in the current study, our findings have the potential to create a great deal of discussion and future research about how friendships, and social relationships more generally, vary across cultures. Naturally, our findings have many implications for theories in social and relationship sciences, including those that make hypotheses about the formation and maintenance of relationships ( Rusbult, 1980 ), how the self varies across contexts—and the social implications of this variation ( Kitayama et al., 2018 ), how economic and external stressors affect opportunities and outcomes of relationships ( Ross et al., 2019 ), and even the social nature of emotions that can originate in friendships ( Larson et al., 1986 ; van Kleef et al., 2016 ). In the current study, we provided important, basic descriptive information about how much—and some specific ways in which—cultures vary in the importance they place on friendships. As a result, researchers can begin to create more formalized models for why friendships are influential for health and well-being and the conditions under which these associations can be maximized ( Hartup and Stevens, 1999 ; Sandstrom and Dunn, 2014 ). In the sections below, we provide a summary of our results, intentionally link the results to extant theory and research, and highlight the many remaining unknowns for how friendships—and the degree to which people value them—vary across cultures.

Do Friendships and the Effect of Friendships Vary Across Individual- and Country-Level Factors?

We found that several individual- and country-level factors were significantly associated with variation in friendship importance. Some of these factors also interacted with valuing friendships to predict health and well-being. Below, we focus on discussing the factors with significant interactions.

Individual-Level Factors

Across cultures, women experienced greater well-being benefits when they rated friendships as important. Women’s friendships often consist of more intense emotional sharing and self-disclosure behavior compared to men’s friendships, and men’s friendships often involve more group activities and fewer expressions of affection and support ( Wright, 1982 ). This may be why women value friendships more and yield greater benefits for their mental and physical well-being.

That older adults who valued friendships were happier suggests that placing high importance in social relationships can serve as a successful coping strategy that enhances well-being when encountering the adversity of older adulthood ( Keller and Wood, 1989 ; Dykstra, 1995 ; Hutchinson et al., 2008 ; Cornwell and Waite, 2009 ; Chopik, 2017 ). A great deal of work is dedicated to how older adults fulfill their need to connect with others, which is a critical factor for preventing loneliness at this age ( Charles, 2010 ; Masi et al., 2011 ). When older adults place low importance on friendship, they may be less likely to receive emotional and practical help from friends—leaving them exposed, with no buffers, to the negative emotions stemming from changes in their lives (e.g., declines in physical health). For younger adults, the contribution of friendship importance may not be as strong. Friendship importance may be less closely related to health and well-being given younger adults’ higher likelihood of deriving well-being from the achievement of information- and status-related goals in contrast to older adults’ focus on close relationships ( Luong et al., 2011 ).

People who reported higher levels of education were happier, healthier, and reported higher levels of subjective well-being. However, people with lower levels of education benefited the most from placing a high importance on friendships. In other words, friendship importance partially compensated for many negative consequences associated with lower levels of education. There are a few possible explanations for the role of friendship importance in buffering against the negative effects of lower education on an individual’s quality of life. For instance, friend networks might provide additional social resources to people with lower levels of education, possibly narrowing the inequalities between them and highly educated individuals ( Adler and Newman, 2002 ; Mirowsky and Ross, 2019 ).

Country-Level Factors

Valuing friendships was more strongly related to subjective well-being among people living in countries high in income inequality. Like the effects of education (for individuals), it could be that friendships buffer against negative societal pressures and conditions of living in a highly unequal society. However, ultimately, it is unclear why economic-related variables like education and income inequality modulate the benefits of social relationships on health and well-being. Future research can take a more holistic approach by examining the specific stressors that income inequality at the country-level causes for individuals and how friendship might ameliorate some of these stressors.

In general, we found that individualism predicted lower happiness and subjective well-being. However, placing higher importance on friendship was associated with particularly better health and happiness in countries high in individualism. Given that people from individualistic countries are more vulnerable to loneliness when they lack interactions with friends ( Lykes and Kemmelmeier, 2014 ), it is not surprising that our study found a stronger association between friendship importance and health and well-being. The social arrangement of collectivistic cultures promotes interdependence and cherishes the well-being of the group (over the individual), which may result in obtaining more benefits from kin networks. In individualistic cultures, people might receive these benefits more from friendship networks. However, people in more individualistic countries tend to maintain high mobility within interpersonal relationships, value self-dependence, keep more personal space, and maintain weaker social ties ( Markus and Kitayama, 1991 ; Trafimow et al., 1991 ; Kitayama et al., 1997 )—for these people, valuing friends seem to buffer against the negative link between individualism and happiness/well-being.

Consistent with previous research, we found that uncertainty was related to worse health, lower happiness, and lower subjective well-being ( Roll et al., 2015 ). However, friendship importance was more strongly related to subjective well-being in uncertain countries. Although country-level long-term orientation did not predict individual-level friendship importance, given that friends provide individuals with a sense of engagement and control over one’s life, valuing friendships still seems to buffer against the anxiety that arises from living in a country that is uncomfortable with uncertainty ( Veiel and Baumann, 1992 ; Leary et al., 1995 ). Interestingly, people who value friendships were particularly healthy in countries with a long-term orientation. Although we are speculating, a country’s long-term orientation may impede well-being because it drives the country to implement changes that may be beneficial in the future but may not always translate to immediate improvements in individuals’ lives. It could be that people who value friendships are less affected by this long-term focus at the expense of immediate benefits for individuals.

Finally, indulgence predicted higher levels of health, happiness, and subjective well-being. Further, valuing friendships was particularly important for well-being in countries where indulgence was low (and restraints were higher). This aligns with previous research in which indulgence can be a strategy for upregulating positive emotions and reducing stress ( Livingstone and Srivastava, 2012 ; Petersen et al., 2018 ). Friends are often a source of fun and pleasure, and among individuals who place importance on friends, they may yield more benefits in countries that are lower in indulgence. People living in countries higher in indulgence may not need to depend as closely on friendships to yield positive emotional benefits.

Limitations and Future Directions

The current study had many strengths, as it employed a large sample of people from several different to examine the roles of friendship and culture on health and well-being. Nevertheless, there are limitations that should be addressed.

First, although our large sample enabled us to detect small effects and estimate effects with greater precision, the question of whether the effects are practically meaningful for individuals’ lives is worthy of discussion ( Cohen, 1990 ; Funder and Ozer, 2019 ). This is especially the case for interactions between friendship importance and country-level factors, which tended to be the smallest in our study. Because this research was exploratory, it is possible that our large sample size resulted in some statistically significant—but not practically significant—findings. However, given that friendship was (and has been) an important predictor of health and well-being, it was important to examine how the contribution of friendship varied across different cultural contexts. In effect size terms, the differences between cultures were relatively small, suggesting that friendship is beneficial across many cultures. However, future work can examine the real-world significance of our effects, whether that be the effects of friendships interaction with a country’s economic or social standing or the number of years added to an individual’s life.

A second limitation was the way we assessed the importance of friendship and our outcome variables. More specifically, we used single-item indicators for most of our variables. Unfortunately, the WVS did not have any or sufficient information on the number of friends people had, the social activities they engaged in (and with whom), sufficient data on the amount of time spent with friends, or the actual quality of the participants’ friendships. Thus, we were only able to use a broad and crude indicator of friendship importance. Of course, knowing how much individuals think friendships are important is an informative measure—it likely gives some insight into how much they invest in the friendships in their lives. Further, more specific or nuanced measures [e.g., the number of “friends” (defined by participants) or quality of friendships] might differ according to individual-/country-level factors. Thus, a broader indicator of friendship investment with little ambiguity about its meaning may have been most appropriate for cross-cultural research. However, it would be important to have a multi-item indicator of friendship importance and directly compare it with other measures before making any conclusions. Future research should take a broader approach to the study of friendship by examining different measures of friendship investment and quality.

Related, the current study focused on a relatively narrow set of cultural indicators and did so in a largely exploratory fashion (see Footnote 3 for additional details). This approach also involved examining these cultural indicators at one static point in time. Worth noting, cultures and countries are not static entities and change considerably over time ( Varnum and Kitayama, 2011 ; Varnum and Grossmann, 2017 ). For example, there is a great deal of evidence suggesting global increases in and shifts toward greater individualism ( Grossmann and Varnum, 2015 ; Santos et al., 2017 ). Indeed, the relative weighting of the importance of friends versus family has even been considered to be at least a partial reflection of individualism ( Santos et al., 2017 ). We did model year of data collection as a covariate in Footnote 5, but even these analyses fail to capture the dynamic nature of cultures, and using just one index of individualism (i.e., the Hofstede dimensions, which have received a great deal of criticism; Triandis et al., 1988 ; Schwartz, 1990 ; Talhelm, 2019 ) limited our ability in this regard. Future research should more thoughtfully model how cultural characteristics—and their psychological and health consequences—change and evolve over historical time ( Chopik, 2020 ).

Finally, we hope that this report will provide useful information for other researchers in the formation of explicit hypotheses to test in future studies. Because of the lack of additional data available on valuing friendship and other potentially important variables, we were unable to test many of the mechanisms that we proposed might link friendship importance to health and well-being in certain cultures. For some cultures, valuing friendship might entail the exchange of instrumental support, which leads to better outcomes; for other cultures, it might entail the exchange of emotional support, which leads to better outcomes ( Wilson et al., 1999 ; Merz and Huxhold, 2010 ; Rook, 2015 ). Further, these varying mechanisms might be dampened or enhanced based on additional cultural factors. Future researchers can use our preliminary findings to investigate why valuing friendships are associated with better outcomes in different contexts.

In pursuing these questions for future research, we would also like to advocate for methods and approaches that reduce researchers’ degrees of freedom when examining cultural differences in relational and psychosocial characteristics ( Simmons et al., 2011 ; Roberts, 2015 ; Milfont and Klein, 2018 ; Vazire, 2018 ). This is especially true when approaching questions in such an exploratory way that we did here. For example, variation in the selection of cultural characteristics, variables measured or made available, analytic models, and interpretation criteria—many of which are arbitrary—can contribute to compromised reproduction of cultural differences that might undermine the science of cultural and relational differences. Unfortunately, we did not engage in these efforts in the current study but encourage others to do so. To this end, for both existing data sets and novel data collection efforts, preregistration and upfront justifications of these decision points can make for a more reproducible understanding of cultural differences in relational behavior ( LeBel et al., 2017 ; Milfont and Klein, 2018 ; Haven and Van Grootel, 2019 ; Weston et al., 2019 ).

This study examined the effects of valuing friendships on people’s health, happiness, and well-being among 323,200 individuals from 99 different countries around the world. The current study is the most comprehensive and diverse examination of friendships on health and well-being to date. Our findings suggest that valuing friendships is generally associated with better health, well-being, and happiness. In many cases, placing a high value on friendship was particularly important for health and well-being in settings typically associated with lower well-being (e.g., countries high in income inequality and individualism). Our findings highlight the importance of considering not only how much people value friendships but also the situating social relationships within broader individual and cultural contexts.

Data Availability Statement

Publicly available datasets were analyzed in this study. This data can be found here: Data from the World Values Survey is publicly available for researchers. The study can be accessed via http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp .

Ethics Statement

The analyses reported in this manuscript were deemed exempt from ethical oversight as it did not constitute the traditional type of human subjects research (MSU IRB#STUDY00002967).

Author Contributions

PL and WC conceived the study. WC analyzed the data and created the tables and figures. PL, JO, KL, and WC drafted the manuscript and provided critical edits. All the authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Sam Warshaw for comments on a previous draft of this manuscript.

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.570839/full#supplementary-material

• ^ There are two additional items available in the WVS pertaining to friendships. One question was about living up to expectations put on individuals by friends (“Do you agree that you make a lot of effort to live up to what your friends expect?;” available for 59% of the sample) and a question about how often people spent time with friends (available for 17% of the sample). Because the former question is relatively ambiguous in its measurement (e.g., is it measuring a form of peer pressure, self-imposed pressure, or effort to invest in friendships), we ultimately decided not to include it in the current report. The latter question was available for too few people and countries that we elected to not include it here. However, in the interest of transparency, we are disclosing that these additional items related to friendships exist in the WVS.
• ^ Because many cultural indicators are often correlated with one another, we examined if any of the correlations between cultural variables were problematic and should not be entered simultaneously into the model. We found a strong negative correlation between power distance and individualism ( r = −0.68). Upon running models sequentially, alternating the exclusion of these two variables, we found that the results did not differ at all, so we elected to include all of the variables in the model simultaneously.
• ^ There is seemingly an infinite number of variables on which cultures may differ. To reasonably present the main ways in which cultural variables might affect friendship importance, we focused on the Hofstede dimensions as they have been most clearly linked to cross-cultural variation in health and well-being and, to a degree, friendships. Nevertheless, there are many other taxonomies that could be chosen. Given reviewer feedback, we ran additional analyses predicting variation in friendship importance from social axiom characteristics (n = 37 countries available that overlapped with our current sample; Leung and Bond, 2004 ), self-construal (n = 28; Vignoles et al., 2016 ), relational mobility (n = 37; Thomson et al., 2018 ), Schwartz values (n = 63; Schwartz, 2006 ), GLOBE characteristics (n = 51; House et al., 2004 ), looseness–tightness (n = 27; Gelfand et al., 2011 ), human development (n = 94; UNDP, 2019a ), population density (n = 94; UNDP, 2019b ), and pathogen prevalence (n = 96; Murray and Schaller, 2010 ). The vast majority of these characteristics did not predict variation in friendship importance when tested in separate models: most social axioms ( p s > 0.112), most forms of self-construal ( p s > 0.092), relational mobility ( p = 0.788), Schwartz values ( p s > 0.06), GLOBE characteristics ( p s > 0.08), looseness–tightness ( p s = 0.629), human development ( p = 0.440), population density ( p = 0.440), and pathogen prevalence ( p = 0.676). The two exceptions were that people from countries higher in social complexity (a social axiom; r = 0.525, p = 0.002) and countries higher in self-direction (a self-construal dimension; r = 0.43, p = 0.043) reported placing higher importance on friendships. We urge caution in interpreting these effects as there were relatively few countries available for the social axiom and self-construal analyses. The results are reported in Supplementary Tables 1–9 .
• ^ Based on the recommendation of a reviewer, we examined the effects of cultural differences in response styles for our substantive results examining each outcome. Although it is difficult to conduct many formal examinations of response styles given our use of single-item indicators, we did run a number of supplementary analyses examining the impact of acquiescence on attenuating the results reported here. Following the recommended procedures ( van Herk et al., 2004 ; Harzing, 2006 ), we calculated the proportion of individuals responding with extreme values [i.e., either 1 (for disacquiescence) or 4 (for acquiescence)] on our measure of friendship importance. The average acquiescence balance (acquiescence minus disacquiescence) for each country was used as a measure of acquiescence bias. This country level score ranged from 18.7 to 78.2% ( M = 43.10, SD = 14.50). Entering acquiescence bias as a covariate in each model did not change the results in any way (i.e., there were minor/small variations in the estimates but none that changed the significance or interpretation of the effects). This could be partially due to acquiescence biases being largely unrelated to happiness ( p = 0.28) and subjective well-being ( p = 0.81). Acquiescence bias was associated with physical health ( t = 2.58, p = 0.01) such that countries choosing more extreme values on the friendship variable reported better health. However, even in the context of this significant effect, the other main effects and interactions were the same in their significance and interpretation. Although we were limited in the degree to which we could assess the effects of response style biases, we encourage future researchers to more formally examine sources of this variation and how this variation might affect conclusions about cultural differences in social and psychological constructs.
• ^ A helpful reviewer suggested that we take advantage of the multiwave assessments and large sample size of the WVS. Specifically, we controlled for wave of data collection and found that people in more recent waves valued friendships more (linear effect of wave; r = 0.035, p < 0.001), were healthier ( r = 0.068, p < 0.001), were happier ( r = 0.066, p < 0.001), and reported higher life satisfaction ( r = 0.057, p < 0.001); none of our substantive findings changed (although some marginally significant effects became non-significant). They also recommended that we use a cross-validation approach in which the data set is split in half to see how reliable the findings were ( Weston et al., 2019 ). Although this was suggested after the main analyses were already done, we still thought it was a good idea and provide some test of how robust the findings are. Thus, we split the sample in half and re-ran all of our analyses on both halves. We found the results from Table 1 , were reproduced across the two smaller halves. For the analyses in Tables 2 – 4 , most of the moderation effects were reproduced across the analyses, with just a few exceptions, specifically, the power distance and long-term orientation moderation effects (for health), the power distance moderation effect (for happiness), and the long-term orientation moderation effect (for subjective well-being). Thus, these particular moderation effects should be viewed with some skepticism given that they were not reproduced across the two random halves of the data set.

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Keywords : friendship, collectivism/individualism, Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, health, happiness, World Values Survey (WVS)

Citation: Lu P, Oh J, Leahy KE and Chopik WJ (2021) Friendship Importance Around the World: Links to Cultural Factors, Health, and Well-Being. Front. Psychol. 11:570839. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.570839

Received: 09 June 2020; Accepted: 23 November 2020; Published: 18 January 2021.

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Copyright © 2021 Lu, Oh, Leahy and Chopik. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: William J. Chopik, [email protected]

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An Exploration of Friendship and Well-Being in Established Adulthood and Midlife

• Published: 22 July 2022
• Volume 30 , pages 53–63, ( 2023 )

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• Michelle E. Schmidt   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1936-853X 1 ,
• Hannah Pellicciotti 1 &
• Rose Marie Long 1  

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The current paper explores adult friendship and its relation to satisfaction with life and loneliness during established adulthood and midlife. The sample ( n  = 124) consisted of 59 established adults (30–45 years) and 65 midlifers (46–65 years), with the majority of participants characterized as White, middle-income, and female. Participants completed the Network of Relationships-BSV scale (Furman and Buhrmester, International Journal of Behavioral Development 33:470–478, 2009) to measure friendship quality, the Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener et al., Journal of Personality Assessment 49:71–75, 1985) to measure one’s global sense of life satisfaction, and the UCLA Loneliness Scale (Russell, Journal of Personality Assessment 66:20–40, 1996) to measure participants’ level of loneliness. Results suggest that friendship plays a more central part in the lives of those in midlife compared to those in established adulthood and that loneliness is higher in established adulthood than in midlife. There were no significant differences in satisfaction with life for the two groups. Implications of the findings are discussed with regard to the middle adult years as two distinct age frames.

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Schmidt, M.E., Pellicciotti, H. & Long, R.M. An Exploration of Friendship and Well-Being in Established Adulthood and Midlife. J Adult Dev 30 , 53–63 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10804-022-09421-8

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What makes someone a perfect friend? Here’s what new research says

A recent study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships offers new insights into what qualities we prioritize in our friends. The research finds that traits such as loyalty, reliability, trustworthiness, and honesty are deemed essential, or necessities, in friendships. Meanwhile, traits like being forgiving, sharing information, emotional intelligence, and conscientiousness about debts are considered luxuries, not essential but desirable.

Throughout history, from Aristotle to modern thinkers, the nature of friendship has been a subject of philosophical and psychological inquiry. Knowing which traits people value in friends can help researchers understand the benefits and functions of these relationships beyond mere companionship, particularly in terms of evolutionary advantages such as survival and well-being.

“I have been interested in friendship preferences since it is such an understudied area,” said study author Jessica (Jessi) D. Ayers , an assistant professor of psychological science at Boise State University. “Most traditional social psychology theories have pointed to similarity, familiarity, and physical proximity as the primary drivers of friendship initiation, and it has only been in the last 10-20 years that researchers have begun to consider individual differences in preferences that may influence who we want to become friends with.”

To identify which traits are seen as essential (necessities) and which are viewed as desirable but not essential (luxuries) in friendships, the researchers conducted two separate studies.

The first study included individuals, mostly undergraduate students, from a large public university in the Southwestern United States and employed a budget paradigm, an economic-based methodology designed to simulate decision-making under resource constraints.

Participants were tasked with creating their “perfect” friend using a hypothetical budget. Each was given a set number of “friendship tokens,” which they could allocate among various traits to enhance these characteristics in their ideal friend. These traits included loyalty, reliability, trustworthiness, honesty, forgiveness, information sharing, emotional intelligence, and conscientiousness about repaying debts.

A key aspect of this method is its use of different budget levels to mimic economic constraints: low, medium, and high. Participants assigned to the low budget condition had to make tough choices about which traits were truly essential, as their limited tokens forced them to prioritize. Conversely, those in the high budget condition could afford to invest in both necessary and luxury traits, providing a contrast to reveal which traits are luxuries.

The researchers found that traits such as loyalty, reliability, trustworthiness, and honesty emerged as fundamental necessities in friendship. These are the traits participants prioritized heavily even under financial constraints, suggesting their non-negotiable status in what constitutes a vital aspect of a friend.

On the other hand, traits like forgiveness, information sharing, emotional intelligence, and conscientiousness about repaying debts were categorized as luxuries. These traits were selected more frequently by participants who had more tokens to spend, indicating that while such traits are desirable, they are not considered essential for the friendship to exist.

The second study replicated and extended the findings of the first by employing a forced-choice paradigm with a larger sample of 449 participants. This method was designed to probe the hierarchical nature of trait preferences more deeply than the budget paradigm could.

In this study, participants faced forced-choice scenarios where they had to choose between two combinations of friend traits. Each scenario pitted different necessity traits against each other, luxury traits against each other, and necessity traits against luxury traits. This approach allowed researchers to observe which traits were consistently chosen over others, thus indicating their relative importance and confirming the necessity-luxury distinction.

For instance, a typical choice might involve deciding between a friend who is always loyal but never reliable versus a friend who is always reliable but never loyal. This method highlights which traits participants value most when directly compared, thus providing insights into the hierarchical ordering of trait preferences within the categories of necessities and luxuries.

The results from the forced-choice scenarios supported those of the budget paradigm, where necessity traits were consistently chosen over luxury traits. This consistency across different methodological approaches adds robustness to the findings, reinforcing the distinction between essential and non-essential friendship traits.

“Friendships — how we make them, what we look for, and how we maintain them — are a lot more complex than meets the eye,” Ayers told PsyPost. “We are only just beginning to understand all of the decisions that people have to make when they decide whether to initiate or maintain a friendship with another person.”

Interestingly, the study revealed minimal differences between male and female participants in their trait preferences, suggesting a general consensus across genders regarding what is fundamentally necessary versus luxurious in friendships.

“One of the biggest surprises was the lack of sex differences,” Ayers said. “Most theories of friendship have suggested that there should be sex differences in friendships/friendship preferences since men and women have faced different adaptive problems over the course of human history. Sex differences have even been shown in some previous work that I used as the basis for this investigation.”

But the study, like all research, has limitations. Its participant pool was largely collegiate, potentially skewing the applicability of its findings across different age groups and cultural backgrounds. Additionally, all traits were considered in isolation, detached from the dynamic real-world interactions that typically influence friendship formations.

“The lack of sex differences suggests there may be a major caveat to these findings,” Ayers noted. “It is possible that we did not observe any sex differences because we asked participants about their preferences for positive traits in potential friends. Since everyone can benefit from these traits, it makes sense then that we would not see sex differences in these traits but might still observe them in traits that are more differentiated by adaptive problem. It is also possible that there really aren’t sex difference in preferences, but where these sex differences actually exist is in the ways that individuals display that they possess these traits.”

The researchers suggest future studies could expand demographic inclusivity and examine how friendship trait preferences evolve over a person’s lifetime. Future research could also aim to recreate more complex social contexts to test these preferences more authentically.

“My long term goals are to continue understanding preferences in friendship initiation and maintenance, to eventually understand if violations of these preferences leads to friendship dissolution or if the story surrounding dissolution is also more complex,” Ayers said.

The study, “ How do you build the perfect friend? Evidence from two forced-choice decision-making experiments ,” was authored by Jessica D. Ayers, Jaimie Arona Krems, and Athena Aktipis.

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Learning in friendship groups: developing students’ conceptual understanding through social interaction

Carl senior.

1 Department of Psychology (SW509b), School of Life and Health Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham, UK

Chris Howard

2 Psychology Department, University of Derby, Derby, UK

The role that student friendship groups play in learning was investigated here. Employing a critical realist design, two focus groups on undergraduates were conducted to explore their experience of studying. Data from the “case-by-case” analysis suggested student-to-student friendships produced social contexts which facilitated conceptual understanding through discussion, explanation, and application to “real life” contemporary issues. However, the students did not conceive this as a learning experience or suggest the function of their friendships involved learning. These data therefore challenge the perspective that student groups in higher education are formed and regulated for the primary function of learning. Given these findings, further research is needed to assess the role student friendships play in developing disciplinary conceptual understanding.

INTRODUCTION

There is an extensive literature conducted from a range of theoretical perspectives and methodologies on the role of groups and student learning in higher education (see Haggis, 2009 ; Lundberg, 2014 ). The concept of the “group” is heavily contested within this literature with discrepancies in the formation, structure, size, duration, and function ( Baron and Kerr, 2003 ; Forsyth, 2009 ). Despite this, within higher education (HE) practice, characterizing the “group” has tended to be more clear-cut. Groups of students are often constructed within the parameters of a particular educational program by tutors to address an explicitly defined learning objective (see Boud et al., 2001 ). From this perspective, student groups tend to be small scale (e.g., 2–5 members), function within the confines of the classroom and achieve tasks through cooperative or collaborative learning ( Bruffee, 1993 ). Cooperative learning involves students dividing roles and responsibilities between group members, so learning becomes an independent process and outcome. On the other hand, collaborative learning involves students working together by developing shared meanings and knowledge to solve a task or problem ( Dillenbourg et al., 1996 , Dillenbourg, 1999 ). From this perspective, learning is conceptualized as a social process but also one that ultimately results in an individual outcome. That is, collaborative learning may facilitate individual conceptual understanding and higher-order thinking ( Gillies, 2000 ).

The above perspectives on group learning both assume that groups are formed within the confines of formal learning environments (e.g., lecture theaters), involve students on the same degree program and have the explicit function of achieving a learning task. However, we have previously shown that student groups also tend to form spontaneously outside of the lecture room without the intervention of a tutor ( Senior et al., 2012 ; see also Havnes, 2008 ); but, their function tends to remain centered on achieving an agreed and defined outcome by group members (e.g., the completion of a learning task). In this light, groups may disband once the task is completed by group members ( Davies, 2009 ). The findings from the current study show that students use existing social networks such as friends as well as organized study groups as a mechanism for learning. Moreover, students may have used the social contexts in which they interacted with their friends outside of the classroom to further their understanding of disciplinary concepts in Psychology. However, the students did not conceive this to be a learning experience or suggest the function of their friendship groups involved learning. In this light, the current study suggests, in some contexts, students may not create, develop, and regulate groups for the function of learning as suggested in the literature (see Wenger, 1998 ; Borzillo and Probst, 2008 ; Orsmond et al., 2013 ) but use existing social groups as primae facie contexts in which to learn through social interaction. We refer to this as an “implicit community,” where tasks or events are achieved collaboratively but there is no awareness of the actual learning process or the subsequent outcome. This paper is divided into four sections: (1) theoretical accounts of student learning and groups; (2) the role of friendship groups and student learning; (3) discussion of the focus group methodology informed by critical realism which was employed to explore the role between groups and student learning; (4) the extent to which friendship groups regulated student understanding of disciplinary concepts (cognitive accounts of learning) or facilitated the development of disciplinary identities (social accounts of learning).

STUDENT LEARNING AND GROUPS

Within the literature on student learning, cognitive approaches have tended to be the most influential with regard policy and practice (see Entwistle, 2001 , 2009 ). From a cognitive perspective, learning is conceived in terms of information processing, achieved through the interplay of cognitive structures and processes ( Marton and Pang, 2006 ). In this light, learning is construed as an individualistic outcome, best measured by the “depth” and “quality” of information processing. This underpins the distinction between “surface” and “deep” approaches to learning ( Marton and Säljö, 1976 ), which has historically had a significant impact on the way in which the student experience has been analyzed, measured, and discussed ( Richardson, 1990 ; Webb, 1997 ). Moreover, a surface approach involves superficial processing of information, which is categorized by memorization, whereas a deep approach involves a deeper level processing of information, which is characterized by conceptual “understanding” ( Entwistle, 2001 ).

Over recent years in HE both undergraduate and postgraduate programs have tended to be designed to provide opportunity for students to work collaboratively and even in some cases across national boundaries ( Dolmans et al., 2001 ; Keay et al., 2014 ; Rienties et al., in press ). Here, students tend to be organized into small scale “groups,” which are designed to complete specific tasks that correspond to formalized learning objectives ( Davies, 2009 ). This conceptualization of the “group” centers on Lewin’s (1948) notion of “interdependence,” where the success of individual group members is bound to the success of the group completing the task. The concept of the “group” in this context follows a stage driven approach, which is often employed in organizational settings ( Reid and Hammersley, 2000 ). That is, the group forms for the purpose of completing a task, roles are assigned to group members, norms are established and the group disbands once its aim has been achieved (see Tuckman, 1965 ; Baron and Kerr, 2003 ). Within this framework, groups may employ principles from cooperative learning, where each member has a distinct role and largely works independently to achieve a task. Whereas, collaborative learning involves students working together, so roles may become interdependent or blurred ( Bruffee, 1993 ). However, within these groups the emphasis is on the role of the course tutor who is central to the group development and hence its success as a potential learning device ( Boud, 2001 ; Lancaster and Strand, 2001 ; Curseu and Pluut, 2013 ).

The evidence on the relationship between student groups and learning is encouraging from a pedagogic perspective. Barton et al. (2005) found students working in groups were more likely to score higher on an “openness to experience” scale that is significantly associated with a deep approach to learning ( Zhang, 2003 ) compared to students who studied alone. Additional support was revealed by our previous work where it was found that students who completed a coursework task in a group significantly achieved a higher grade than students who completed a coursework task alone ( Senior et al., 2012 ). The benefits of group work are such that it promotes “active” learning characterized by students engaging with a learning task and the development of wide portfolio of critical thinking skills ( Gokhale, 1995 ). Group work may also increase students’ self-efficacy and motivation ( Davies, 2009 ). Whilst the experience of working in groups may facilitate conceptual understanding, it additionally provides an opportunity to develop inter-personal skills which in turn may lead to an improvement in subsequent employability ( Senior and Cubbidge, 2010 ; Senior et al., 2014 ) or as Mello (1993) argues, prepares students for the “real world” with the opportunity to develop social skills that are very likely to be required after graduation (see also Tymon, 2013 ).

Unfortunately student experiences working within such learning groups are not universally positive and some do report negative experiences. Those students who do not readily perceive the benefit of group work may not engage and subsequently interact with other group members ( Walker, 2001 ). In turn, this may lead to negative outcomes such as “free riding” where some group members benefit from the accomplishments of others in the group but they do not contribute themselves ( Salomon and Globerson, 1989 ). In the context of higher education, collectively a group may score high during an assessment designed to measure conceptual understanding but at an individual level “free riders” within that group may not understand the intended concept. This is problematic as this may produce a “sucker effect” where other group members respond to “free riding” by also becoming “free riders” themselves. Here, group work in HE may actually inhibit individual student conceptual development, which would require course tutors to carefully manage, design, and assess groups effectively.

Overall, from a cognitive perspective of learning, there is a literature that suggests working collaboratively may facilitate quality “individual” learning, which involves conceptual understanding. However, these groups tend to be organized by course tutors, have a distinct function on completing a specified learning task and disband once this is achieved. In light of this, it remains to be seen whether or not learning can occur in other forms of groups between students? One such social group that is ubiquitous throughout the HE sector are friendship groups.

THE IMPORTANCE OF FRIENDSHIP GROUPS IN LEARNING

Early work has shown that friendship groups play an influential and significant role in the student life cycle ( Spady, 1970 ). Students have been shown to use such social activity to develop cooperative learning strategies across a range of different classroom settings and while not all lead to equally effective strategies in learning most if not all such strategies are related to the development of a portfolio of transferable skills such as self esteem or the ability to work well with others ( Slavin, 1988 ). This social skillset has been shown to play an effective mechanism in the facilitation of learning across a diverse student population ( Hurtado et al., 2003 ). Interestingly there is an emerging body of evidence suggesting that the development of such learning strategies is also predicated by engaging within a friendship group on various social media platforms ( Dabbagh and Kitsantas, 2012 ; Wang et al., 2012 ) which suggests that designers of distance learning provision should consider opportunities for students to engage with such activities as part of the online learning experience.

Within an HE setting and during the course of a campus based degree program students are likely to form and develop many diverse friendships with their peers on both their course and in the wider student community. According to Hartup and Stevens (1997 , p. 355):

“Friendship consists mainly of being attracted to someone who is attracted in return, with parity governing the social exchanges between the individuals involved. Friendships carry expectations that “best” friends will spend more time with one another than other persons, offering one another emotional support, including loyalty, trust, intimacy, and fun. ”

In light of the above quote, friendship groups may develop between students based on some form of mutual attraction, for example interests and even political values. Students may also form friendships with other students on their course for a variety of reasons including an interest in the discipline they are studying. Given the almost universal and pervasive nature of the friendship group within the student population it is incumbent on us to examine its utility, if any, as a potential learning device. The research literature with young children does suggest friendship groups positively impact on cognitive, emotional, and social development ( Hartup, 1989 ) and aid psychological and affective adjustment to formal educational environments ( Berndt, 1999 ). However, Antonio (2001) argues despite the growing literature on peer-to-peer interactions in HE, their still remains a need for research on the role of friendship groups within universities. The large-scale survey study conducted by the author above ( n = 677) suggested that racially diverse student friendship groups were related to high levels of cultural awareness, racial understanding, and interracial interactions. Whilst this demonstrates the role between friendship groups and human relations, there still remains a lack of evidence on student learning. Nonetheless, Roberts (2009) conducted an ethnographic study of an undergraduate nursing program and found that friendship groups were used by students as a support mechanism where they could “ask anything” to develop their own understanding. This finding suggests that students who were categorized as friends were seen as a valuable source of knowledge, which was not subject to a hierarchical structure based on seniority or time served on the educational program. On the other hand, Antonio (2004) found students tended to use friends on their program of study as a “referral” point to judge their own academic competency. That is to say, friendship groups may be used by individual students as a mechanism to regulate their “academic self concept,” which refers to a student’s perceived academic ability ( Rodriguez, 2009 ).

This process of social comparison may therefore impact on how students interact with their peers and their motivation to learn, which is associated with understanding of concepts ( Entwistle and Waterston, 1988 ; Kahu, 2013 ; Mega et al., 2014 ). In this light, existing friendship groups between students do indeed impact on students learning. However, as noted above, while such groups are effective in ensuring that students do develop an “academic self concept” they are limited insofar as they suffer from the same constraints as the more formal tutor developed work groups, e.g., they tend to be defined for a specific purpose and will cease to function after their objectives have been met. However, while work has started to show that spontaneous friendship groups do indeed play an important role in the development of work based learning ( Carr and Gidman, 2012 ) their efficacy within the HE sector and student learning has yet to be examined. The current research was therefore conducted as an exploratory study investigating the extent to which existing friendships between students may impact learning. These data would therefore provide an insight in whether learning in groups (such as friendships) can exist when the function of the group is not explicitly centered on completing a learning task and what this involves.

METHODOLOGY

Two focus groups each lasting approximately one hour were conducted with seven first year students (for each focus group participants were split into a group of three or four, age range 18–20 years, five females and two males) enrolled on a Human Psychology degree at a UK higher education institution. Participants were randomly selected from a cohort of approximately 150 students. All procedures were approved by the local institutional ethics review board and all of the participants provided written informed consent prior to taking part in the focus groups. The sample size was deemed appropriate for the current study as it is consistent with the critical realist assumptions that underpin this study (see Parker, 1992 ) and with existing work in the field (e.g., Sims-Schouten et al., 2007 ; Easton, 2010 ).

The focus group schedule aimed to gather data on the students’ perceptions and experiences of learning. As the role of the researcher is one of a “moderator” or “facilitator” ( Kidd and Parshall, 2000 ), there were three broad topics that were raised for group discussion: (1) What does a typical day at university involve? (2) What do you normally do outside of lectures and seminars? (3) What does learning mean to you and how do you know when you have learned something? In line with the principles of qualitative methods in psychological research it was important to use probing questions rather than specific leading questions on the role of friendship groups, as these may have shaped the responses of the participants in a socially desirable manner (see Willig, 2013 ). By using probing topics, this allowed the participants to draw upon their own lived experiences and discuss what was important and relevant to them (see Banister et al., 2011 ). Nonetheless, to ensure the focus groups addressed the role between student social interactions and learning, there were a series of prompts (i.e., What do you talk about with other students from university? Do you meet other students outside of university? What do you do together?) to direct the discussion.

Each focus group was conducted by one of the authors who had not taught the students or had any contact with the students prior to data collection, therefore minimizing social desirability artifacts. Data collection commenced during the final semester of the academic year, providing students with the opportunity to discuss the range of teaching methods, assessment, feedback, learning environments, and strategies experienced during the course of their studies.

The focus group data were transcribed by a research assistant and analyzed by the authors from a critical realist perspective. The key principles of critical realism are the existence of a real world which is multi-layered (ontology) produced by underlying causal mechanisms (epistemology; Bhaskar, 1975 , 1979 ; Pawson, 1989 ). That is to say, mechanisms produce phenomena, which can then be experienced. Given this, as underlying mechanisms are unobservable due to the multi-stratified nature of reality, they can be inferred by exploring the similarities and differences in how people construct and add meaning to their experience of phenomena ( Downward and Mearman, 2007 ). In this case, it is the experience of learning in groups during a first year Human Psychology undergraduate degree program. Despite this, the causal efficiency of a mechanism is regulated by a context ( Lawson, 1997 ). Whilst mechanisms have the causal potential to produce phenomena; this may not be actualized within and across contexts. Within any educational context (e.g., lecture, seminar etc) there are likely to be a range of causal mechanisms that co-exist. This refers to an “open system” as the causal efficacy of a mechanism may be inhibited or actualized by other mechanisms within that context ( Pawson, 1989 ; Sayer, 2000 ). In this light, research from a critical realist perspective becomes the process of inferring the causal mechanism(s) that may have produced the phenomenon under investigation and the contextual conditions in which these structures were realized. The emphasis is on the process of “inferring” mechanisms as these underlying causal structures are assumed to be unobservable; therefore they cannot be directly identified. As Sims-Schouten et al. (2007 , p. 105) argue:

“ This means our attempts to identify and understand deep structures will remain just that – attempts. However, acknowledging that our knowledge of reality will always be limited is not the same as saying that there is no such thing as reality .” [our bold]

However, evidence collected during an empirical investigation on participants’ experience of phenomena will draw upon the activity of mechanism(s), therefore aiding a researcher to make informed inferences and interpretations of causal mechanism(s). This process of inferring mechanisms is referred to as retroduction, which involves moving beyond description to underlying meaning ( Pawson, 1989 ). In this light, inferred mechanism(s) borne from research data are more likely to be valid (i.e., correspond to actual mechanism∖s) than those developed from anecdotal or lay perspectives (see Benton and Craib, 2001 ; Carter and New, 2004 ). Whilst this research was exploratory, the aim was to examine the extent to which learning in friendship groups (proposed mechanism) may have facilitated student understanding (phenomena) during a first year Human Psychology degree (context). This was achieved by employing a “case by case” critical realist analytical approach. The qualitative data coding involved the process of observing variation within and between responses to develop themes. In this light, themes were used to identify similarities and differences in how the students constructed their experience of learning in friendship groups (both in and outside formal learning environments – lectures). From these data, within the context of this exploratory study we address the extent to which learning in friendship groups might be a mechanism for student learning from a psychological perspective. To ensure quality, the themes presented in the analysis were scrutinized by an independent expert in relation to richness and interpretation of data, depth of analysis and overall coherence ( Parker, 1992 ; Elliott et al., 1999 ).

ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION

The first theme to emerge from the data was individual versus group learning. All the participants constructed learning as a cognitive outcome, which was best achieved through individualistic strategies to learn. Learning in the context of a group or with others was constructed as problematic because it prevented students from retaining facts. This is suggested in three extracts below:

“ I learn best on my own, I do the same as you (refers to a participant) I just summarize what was said in a lecture and read over it and over it till it sticks .”

“ I think 1 All names reported throughout are pseudonyms.most of the time I study alone just because I prefer it like that, I think I would get less done in a group as discussion may stop me concentrating on learning the facts. ”

“ Personally I work best alone because I make a list of what I need to look at and tick it off one by one, make my notes and learn it, like I work best like that than trying to do it with other people, because then they can waste your time, like it’s not a waste obviously you are helping someone but you can give up a lot of your time to teach someone something you already know.. .”

These data suggest that learning was conceived as an individualistic cognitive outcome. Moreover, for Janet in the first extract, learning was constructed as the memorization of teaching materials, so successful learning involved accurate recall of information. Consequently, as evidenced in the extract by Dave, groups are conceived as problematic as social interaction may prevent students from retaining facts and hence learning. These data therefore suggest that psychology, as a discipline, is perceived by the students in the focus groups as dealing with concrete “facts” rather than concepts that are subject to debate. In the extract by Zara, learning is constructed as the transmission of information or facts. Overall, this suggests that learning was construed primarily as an individualistic process and outcome to which group work does not provide a facilitative context for this. This conceptualization of learning is largely problematic and challenges the perspective of some higher education practitioners who argue that learning is concerned with change and transformation rather than imparting “facts” or “truths” to passive students (see Prilleltensky and Nelson, 2002 ).

The second theme to emerge from the focus group data was collaborative learning through friendship groups. All the participants discussed the ways in which they interacted with other students on their course who they categorized as friends. These interactions suggested that learning was a social process as friendships provided contexts for participants to regulate how they learned, what they learned and to judge their success as a learner. The three extracts below illustrate the range of interactions participants had with their friends on the course.

“...with my friends that are on my psychology course, I might have a discussion about...umm... whether we understand the stuff given from the lecture, we can then go through it together and have a discussion about it. Like I didn’t really get that lecture, my friend will go yeah I didn’t get it either. We have discussions and arguments about what has been said in lectures. ”

“ With my friends I talk about...um... lectures and then what we didn’t understand and then we’d like each read up a section and then try and explain it to one another and like we did that with one of our lectures and revising and stuff. I think that helps then because you know hearing from your friend is easier than hearing from someone you don’t know. ”

“ Within the exam period I talk with my friends quite a lot actually, like how much revision have you done? Or I might say oh I’ve done some today, yesterday and vice versa especially in exam period time then you talk more about exams. Coursework is exactly the same, well with me like, the coursework date is coming up soon, so I will say what you done and vice versa...um... you kind of go through it with each other and check .”

The above extract by Sarah suggests that interactions with friends were utilized as “reference” points during assessments to regulate learning. In this context, learning was positioned as a quantifiable measure, which could be used to judge how successful a student was by the amount of time they engaged with a task (e.g., revision and coursework). This extract suggests that interactions between friends provide a benchmark or measure to regulate how much time students spend on a learning task. In the extracts by Louise and Colin there is the suggestion that learning is centered on understanding concepts where social interactions between friends are utilized as contexts to facilitate this process. For both these participants, when they had problems understanding concepts from lecture material, their friendships became a resource to help develop their understanding. As evidenced in the extract by Colin, this strategy involved interaction and discussion between friends as they were seen as non-judgmental. Nonetheless, the form of interaction discussed in this extract between friends supports the earlier theme on individual vs. group learning. That is, learning through social interaction involved the transmission of information as a purely individualistic process and outcome. Interestingly, none of the participants explicitly discussed (nor when prompted by the interviewer) the interactions with their friends on their course (like those identified above) as learning experiences. Despite this, as suggested in these data, friendships may be an important aspect for learning during the first year of a degree program. In the extract below, Janet discusses how friendships between herself and other students on her course were developed.

“ All my friends on the course live at home like me but If I have just met someone doing psychology and they are telling me something, I don’t think I would listen but now I have been at unit for a long time and...umm... trust develops, so you become friends and then you can see how you can help each other and err, like helping with references. I wasn’t good with referencing then my friend helped me and like he wasn’t good at spelling and my other friend wasn’t good at setting out paragraphs so were just helping each other out. ”

The extract above suggests friendships were formed based on some commonality between students, in this case where they lived during term time. Despite this, for Janet, trust was critical to developing her friendships with other students and was achieved through regular interactions. Likewise, without trust Janet felt unable to accept the perspectives of other students. Friends therefore provide a support network to facilitate academic development at an individual level. Whilst only one participant discussed the formation of friendships with other students on their course, the extract does suggest that these groups are not developed for the purpose of learning but they provide a context for learning to occur once they are formed. Five of the participants also discussed how existing friendships in the wider student community (that is, outside of their course) were used to develop their conceptual understanding. This is suggested in the two extracts below:

“...there are a lot of guys in my friendship group like you know... umm... when they are sat playing call of duty (video game) or something I am like this is going to make you, you know have more aggression due to the media and stuff just kind of like you know like chucking topics out there like or like we, I don’t know about you guys (refers to other participants), we did a lecture about nature versus nurture and media aggression and stuff like that it’s interesting to chat about with your friends really if it’s relevant to the modern day because friends not on my course will not know what I am on about but if you make it relevant to now then I can get a good discussion with my friends and see what they think and see if they are right .”

“ A couple of my friends were looking at a magazine and at the cover and images and things and I was saying like oh yeah about this and this, anorexia nervosa and this and they were like discussing with me. It was good to come up in conversation because I did this on my course and they were all listening and then talking about it. Also I have a friend who does optometry as well and she was talking about the vision in children and things and I joined in the conversation and she was like what are you doing this? I was like yep, yep I am learning this. It’s quite amusing really; it is good we got discussing it and I was getting a different view and starting to see what it all means .”

The two extracts above both suggest interactions between friends facilitated conceptual understanding through the discussion and application of disciplinary concepts. In the first extract, Suzy applies theories of aggression (which were discussed in a lecture) to her friends’ “warfare” arcade game. This provides a learning experience, which enables Suzy through discussion with her friends to further her understanding of theoretical concepts by applying them to contemporary “real life” situations. The quality of this interaction therefore allowed her to add meaning and judge the validity of the theories involving aggression. In the second extract, Zara discusses two learning experiences with friends at University. The first involved discussion of eating disorders, whilst the second involved the visual perception of children. Interestingly, Zara makes reference to the fact that interacting with her friend who studied optometry provided a context in which she was given an insight into theories of vision from a different perspective (see e.g., Antonio, 2004 ). This experience provided scope for Zara to start to develop an interdisciplinary understanding of the concept of vision. However, integrating different disciplinary perspectives may not be valued across degree programs and may even have a negative relationship with student attainment. Nonetheless, these data are indicative of a deep approach to learning, characterized by an orientation to “understand” and extract “meaning” from a learning task ( Entwistle, 2001 ). This finding therefore contrasts with the first theme, which suggested the participants tended to conceptualize learning in terms of memorization, which was often characterized as “retaining the facts.” These data therefore support the earlier argument that students did not view interactions with their friends as valid learning experiences, since learning was conceived in terms of retention and recall. This interpretation, however, remains tentative given the lack of data on how students explicitly discussed their conceptions of learning in relation to friendship groups. Despite this, the above extracts support the earlier argument that friendship groups were not formed based on the desire to achieve a learning objective but provided a context in which student understanding could be developed. However, these students did not necessarily demonstrate awareness that these interactions had a group function – conceptual development.

These data therefore provide evidence that existing friendships between students on a course and in the wider student community (“outside of the classroom”) were a resource in which the participants developed their understanding of theoretical concepts through discussion, explanation, and application to “real life” contexts. In the context of the current study, friendships may therefore have been an active mechanism facilitating student conceptual understanding. This process of collaborative learning is best understood as an “implicit community,” which refers to individuals achieving a task (in this context learning characterized as conceptual development) through social interaction but demonstrating no self-awareness. That is, people may feel that they are not part of a community or group but still achieve tasks by working collaboratively. This adds to the literature on groups (see Antonio, 2001 , 2004 ; Baron and Kerr, 2003 ) by suggesting that groups may form and function through social interaction but membership may not be a conscious decision. Interestingly, all seven participants conceived learning as knowledge acquisition which involved retention and recall of course material. Furthermore, learning was perceived as “competitive” involving individualistic cognitive processes (retention strategies). Group work was therefore constructed as a problematic endeavor, as it prevented students from engaging in strategies to memorize facts (learn). This suggests the participants may not have seen the interactions they engaged with friends as valid learning experiences; we do, however, present this as a tentative interpretation of the findings given the lack of data directly addressing how students understood the relationship between friendship groups and learning.

The implications of the current research go beyond understanding the dynamics of student focused friendship groups as effective drivers of learning. The findings of the current study suggest that students may interact within such groups but not be immediately aware of the beneficial effect that such activity is having on their subsequent learning of various concepts. Such a finding would inform the current movement on the development of campus real estate that is designed to facilitate such social endeavors ( Morrone and Workman, 2014 ). Initiatives such as the Primary Capital Program or the British Council for School Environments in the UK act as fora for innovation in the design of academic buildings for the tertiary education while initiatives such as the Learning Landscapes in Higher Education 1 is an example of the emerging role that Architects and Educationalists can share together in the HE sector. When considered together with the findings of the current study it is clear that the design of any campus estate needs to incorporate the opportunities for students to meet in a social and non-directed capacity.

It is also interesting to speculate that such a learning mechanism may be used to design effective distance delivery. Specifically, with the regards to the development of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) which often consists of many thousands of students taking part simultaneously. With regards to the design of such programs there is much debate as to the various means to support various learning styles ( Grunewald et al., 2013 ) and program designers are now turning their attentions to various mechanisms that may engender and support a more community based style of learning ( Gillani et al., 2014 ).

The data revealed in the current paper suggest friendships were formed with other students due to some form of mutual attraction, which is consistent with the exiting literature ( Hartup and Stevens, 1997 ). It is important to note this mutual attraction may be centered on some aspect of learning (conceptions of, study strategies, etc.) but the friendship itself was not necessarily formed to specifically facilitate learning. Nonetheless, trust was seen as central to developing friendships and producing contexts where the social interactions between friends stimulated conceptual development at an individual student level. In this sense, collaborative learning was evident as students developed shared meanings and understandings through social interaction, which demonstrates learning at both an individual and social level (see Gillies, 2000 ). As the study was exploratory, involving two focus groups with a sample of seven first year psychology students, these findings are presented tentatively but they do raise a number of research questions that warrant further investigation adopting a longitudinal design: (1) how do friendships form and develop over the course of a degree program? (2) How do students understand and make sense of their friendships groups in higher education? (3) Are there differences between subject areas? (4) To what extent does the social interaction between friends relate to student conceptual development over the course of a degree? (5) To what extent does the interaction between friends relate to the development of disciplinary professional identities over the course of a degree?

Within the context of this study, the focus group data suggested friendship groups may have been a causal mechanism for developing student conceptual understanding. Moreover, whilst students tended to conceive learning as an outcome involving memorization and perceived working in study groups as problematic (as it may prevent students from engaging in strategies to retain information), existing friendship groups provided a context to implicitly further students understanding of theoretical concepts. These friendships were not formed specifically to address a learning objective, which is often assumed from a psychological perspective but developed from some form of mutual attraction between students. The focus group data suggested that these friendship groups provided a setting in which trust was developed between students. Interactions between friends therefore created opportunities for students to explain disciplinary concepts, apply to “real life” situations and gain different perspectives, which may have facilitated conceptual understanding at an individual level. Given the study was exploratory, the findings were presented tentatively but they do suggest the importance of existing groups (not formed for the purpose or shared aim of learning) in developing student understanding. Future research therefore needs to address how friendships form, develop, and are understood by students over the course of a degree program along with the extent to which they produce a deeper conceptual understanding.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

1 See http://www.rm.com/_RMVirtual/Media/Downloads/RM_PCP_White_Paper. pdf or http://www.bcse.uk.net/ or http://learninglandscapes.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/files /2010/04/FinalReport.pdf for further information regarding these initiatives.

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