ABSTRACT
Friendships are remarkably similar across culture and time. There is variety, yet friendship retains its common and essential elements across nearly all settings. The essential elements of friendship include its voluntary nature, its mutual candor, its loyalty, its emphasis on shared activity, and its noticeably personal character. The patterns that emerged underscored the importance of the friends, but family members also had a distinctive role to play. Support from friends, both in one's own network and in the partner's network, was generally more strongly associated with closeness than was support from family members. Confirmatory factor analysis was again used to determine the associations between the three friendship development factors and the three network factors. The life course of any one friendship will be shaped by many different individual, environmental, situational, and dyadic factors. Although every period in life is of interest, the years spanning adolescence and early young adulthood are particularly pivotal from the standpoint of interpersonal relationships.
