ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to present a decade review of the social science scholarship on adult friendship. In their 1992 book on this topic, Blieszner and Adams introduced their Integrative Conceptual Framework for Friendship Research to help them organize a report on the robust findings on adult friendship, to indicate areas where findings had not been replicated and therefore remained unverified, and to identify gaps in the literature that needed to be filled in order for adult friendship to be understood more fully. Although since the publication of this book, the framework has been revised twice to reflect recent research and theoretical developments (Adams & Blieszner, 1994; Adams, Ueno, & Blieszner, in preparation), their review of the research on the internal structure and interactive processes comprising adult friendship patterns has not been updated since that time. This is the focus of this chapter.
