ABSTRACT
This chapter considers three different implicit orientations that scholars adopt in viewing research on sex differences in friendships. It outlines an expanded orientation to the study of women's and men's friendships that proposes a shift in the way the people define and assess communality (intimacy, expressiveness, self-disclosure) and some initial steps toward incorporating potentially influential structural as well as dispositional factors into the people analyses and explorations. It outlines an emerging orientation to the study of sex differences in friendship. The chapter touches on four issues: potentially confounding variables, the size and consistency of sex differences in self-disclosure, the expression of intimacy through shared activities, and the levels of intimacy of men's closer friendships. The foregoing considerations contain a potentially important implication for studies comparing women's and men's friendships. In complementary, a friendship enhances an individual's performance of one or more other roles that are otherwise unrelated to the friendship.
