Exploring the Concept of Friendship

Results

This chapter will discuss various themes emerging from the qualitative interview conducted on the respondent’s understanding of friendship. The entire analysis will be based on the interpretative phenomenological analysis, which entails the understanding of a phenomenon from the perception of people experiencing it (Bloor & Wood, 2006). Therefore, the analysis seeks to understand the true meaning of friendship from the perspective of a respondent who has already experienced friendship. For easier analysis, the researcher adopted the thematic analysis, whereby three superordinate themes are identified and analysed based on three constructed research questions. The following table illustrates the superordinate themes under each research

Common Interest

The theme of common interest emerged as one of the factors that draw people together as friends. Ideally, it emerged from the responses that people develop friendship when they share common interest or pursue common goals at such as common classrooms or hobbies. For example, when asked about how they made their first friendships, the respondent said that: “…I just didn’t know anyone, so em one of my mates, I met him in our history class and I sat next to him and he’s now my best friend you know, we went out to em school discos and stuff like that and he took me under his wing and, yeah nice lad..” This implies that the respondent and his first friend were drawn together by virtue of sharing a class and other hobbies such as disco.

History

It was also evident from the interview that people are drawn together as friends by history or by sharing a past. For instance the respondent made a fried with a girl after realising that they had attended a party together. For example: “...I sat next to this girl erm and who started talking to me and we’d realised that we’d been at a party together once and had a mutual friend, so erm she had a few friends that were with her so the lot of us went to the erm, er what’s it called the fair, the fresher’s fair…” The history of having mutual friends and attending a party together made it easier for them to reconnect and make new friendship.

Equality

The respondent also hinted how equality creates an opportunity for friendship to thrive. For instance, when asked about how he met with one of his friends, the respondent said that: “…In class yeah, and we were in the same form as well so...” Hence, by virtue of sharing the same class, it was easier to get together as friends.

What makes friends worthy of the name

To have a clearer understanding of friendship, the researcher also sought to understand what makes friends worthy of the name, or why one would consider the other as their friends. Two superordinate themes emerged under this research question namely: Commitment to your happiness and obeying your principles.

Support

The respondent indicated that they consider friends as those who support them and guarantee their happiness. For instance, when asked about why they ended up being close, he said: “…I mean I’ve baby sat for one of my mates who was the first guy who’s erm girlfriend’s got a kid and they’re very picky about choosing people who baby-sit, erm so I’ve babysat for them a couple of times, so I suppose …” and that “…Certain level yeah, so there’s some good friends there, and definitely since that with my dad, I’ve er, there’s been quite a bit of support there from them as well so…” This implies that friendships are more valuable, meaningful and worthy when friends support each other; especially in times of need.

Personal Principles

It also emerged from the interviews that friends are worthy of the name when they are able to obey each other’s personal boundaries and principles. The interviewee mentioned several instances whereby they showed dislike for friends who offend them or go against their expectation: “…I sort of learnt the hard way, erm so there are a few folks like that but I always got on, tried to get on with everyone, erm I can’t dislike, erm I fail to dislike people in a way, there’s only very rare people that I dislike and that’s a very good reason, only if they upset my family or something and that’s it, but otherwise I get on well with people in general…” The respondent also expressed contempt for friends who take advantage of them: “… just helping them in all sorts where, where I can, erm they’d hang around with me when it suited them and then just drop me like I was nothing, erm and the next thing they’d be bullying me, teasing me and I wouldn’t know why I was in place, erm but, no …” Therefore, friendship tends to thrive and be worth keeping when friends obey each other’s principles and persona;l boundaries.

How do you attract and keep good friends

The last research question was interested in evaluating how people attract and maintain good friends. The researcher was interested in understanding factors that help people attract good friends and maintain them. Ultimately, the themes of trust and maintaining contact emerged.

Trust

The respondent noted that it was easier to maintain trustworthy friends because trust makes it easier to communicate even with friends through the internet despite even if it has been long since the last contact. For example, when asked about his friends that he had met for long, the respondent said that: “…so we erm got on really well on MSN, wow I’ve never got on so well so fast with someone just over the internet, you know I can trust her, I can tell her anything and I only met her once, I only met her once er for dinner the other day and yeah we get on like a house on fire...” It also emerged from the interviews that it is through trust that friends are able to assist each other at the time of need. For example, when asked whether trust was a major contributor to his friend’s support when his father died, the respondent said that: “…Certain level yeah, so there’s some good friends there, and definitely since that with my dad, I’ve er, there’s been quite a bit of support there from them as well so...” This reveals the important role that trust plays in maintaining friendship.

In conclusion, the main aim of this study was to evaluate the understanding of friendship from the perspective of a respondent who has had various experiences of friendship – using interpretative phenomenological analysis. The researcher intended to answer three major questions, namely what draws people together as friends, what makes friendship worth maintaining, and how people attract and keep good friends. The data analysis process yielded six superordinate themes distributed across the three research questions as follows. As to what brings people together as friends, our analysis found that people who share common interests, shared history or those who are at equal positions are likely to be friends. With regards to what makes friendship worth maintaining, results indicated that people tend to keep friends who give them support at times of need, as well as those who abide by their personality principles.

Last but not least, according to the interview results, the more is more likely to attract and keep friends who trustworthy. But these findings are subject to several limitations that are of importance to acknowledge. For instance, the study findings are limited by reflexivity, whereby the researcher might have systematically attended to their construction of knowledge and understanding of friendship (Forrester, 2010). According to Atkinson & Coffey (2002), this implies that the researcher’s position and background might have influenced what they chose to explore while understanding friendship, methods used in conducting the study, the results considered most appropriate, the angle of investigation and the how the study conclusion was developed. Therefore, the researcher’s position influenced the study results in several ways.

Based on the concept of reflexivity, we assume that the study findings are subject to some level of undesirable researcher bias –especially in the process of interpreting the interview responses and developing the superordinate themes. We speculate some respondent information may not have been placed under original superordinate themes intended by the respondent.

However, as Malterud (2001 p. 484) argues: “preconceptions are not the same as bias unless the researcher failed to mention them.” Besides, the researcher might have approached the interview responses from a different perspective, leading to a different but valid understanding of friendship. However, whereas giving a different approach to understanding a phenomenon may be seen as a reliability issue, other researchers view it as a way of having a more developed an in-depth understanding of the phenomenon (Bloor & Wood, 2006). Besides, all researchers face the challenge with understanding the beliefs, perspectives, and positions in qualitative research because qualitative research is a research approach constructed by humans.

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References

Forrester, M. A. (Ed.). (2010) Doing qualitative research in psychology: A practical guide, Sage

Atkinson, P. And Coffey, A. (2002) ‘Revisiting the Relationship Between Participant

Observation and Interviewing’, in J.F. Gubrium and J.A. Holstein (ed.) Handbook of Interview Research, pp. 801–14. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Bloor, M & Wood, F. (2006) Keywords in Qualitative Methods: A Vocabulary of

ResearchConcepts. London: Sage.