The Concept of Friendship

In the 1970’s, the focus on friendship research was based majorly on emotional relationships and the big question of what attracts individuals to each other. Therefore, the concept of friendship in psychology work was limited. In 1975, Bigelow and La Gaipa researched how children perceived the meaning of friendship and what values they looked for in a friend during different stages of development. This essay will explore the advantages and limitations of Bigelow and La Gaipa’s work whilst taking a critical stance in evaluating the usefulness of their findings and their influence on understanding children’s friendships.

Bigelow and La Gaipa’s study was one of the first psychology experiments that was based on exploring the meaning of friendship and understanding how the values expected in a friend changes as you develop through different stages of your life. Their research allowed psychologists to understand friendship in a new perspective. It also created the concept that the values of friendship and what is expected in close relationships does in fact change over time.

It opened a new pathway for psychologists to explore further. Due to the fact that it was one of the first studies conducted, it provided scientific evidence of the way friendships expectations changed between the ages of 6 and 14. In doing this, they confirmed the difficultly in defining the complex concept of friendship.

The study inspired psychologists in the same area of study to conduct more experiments as they opened up a new pathway to follow. With that being said, in today’s modern society, social media plays a huge role in making and maintaining friendships and Bigelow and la Gaipa’s study is not beneficial in helping to explore these friendships because in the 1970’s the internet was not a factor that needed to be considered.

Bigelow and La Gaipa used written essays to find out what children expected in friendships. This can be seen as extremely valuable because it gave the participants a chance to discuss their views in depth whilst using their own words, thoughts and opinions to describe what friendship meant to them and the values that they thought a bestfriend should have.

However, the essays were written by children between the ages of 6-14. It is a possibility that the younger children involved in the study could have lacked the academic writing and communication skills in order to successfully describe their views, resulting in the information they gave not actually reflecting what they initially meant (REFERNCE). An ethnographic approach could have been seen as an improved alternative when working with younger children. Bigelow and La Gaipa used a large sample of essays (480), meaning that they were able to make generalisations that contributed to the development of understanding children’s friendships. It could be argued that the sample they chose to work with could have resulted in a sampling error. Their research also failed to understand and consider the cultural factors that could impact the meaning of friendship in different societies.

Bigelow and La Gaipa used qualitive data in their study, giving them lots of rich details and first-hand information from a child about what friendship meant to them. However, they then turned their qualitive data into quantitive data. They did this by coming up with a list of characteristics beforehand, that they thought were important factors in friendship. They then used a frequency count every time an expectation was mentioned by a participant. This is known as content analysis and after the study was published it became a popular method of analysis. This is because it decreased the time it took to analyse large samples of data. It also made it easy to group ideas together and produce a numerical conclusion, allowing them to draw conclusions, similarities and differences about the data that they found. Despite this, categorising values of friendships meant that they lost the individuality of the children’s accounts (REFERENCE)

The possibility that the researches may have overlooked certain expectations of friendships proves to be a disadvantage because the values of friendships change with stages of development, so, what they think might be an important value may differ to a child. To conclude, Bigelow and La Gaipa’s findings were significant in helping psychologists to better their understandings friendship expectations. With the use of content analysis, they were able to numerically compare their findings and make generalizations.

However, their study proved to have some limitations as they failed to include differences such as culture and mixed gender friendships, which could have altered their findings. Social media is becoming increasingly important in regard to friendships and the study does not help us to determine the differences between online relationships, so although the study helped to begin the psychological research in friendship, it might not benefit research in todays modern society