Friendship and the construction of the person in adult development.

Title: Friendship and the construction of the person in adult development.
Identifier: AAI9304636
identifier: 9304636
Creator: Bodnar, Susan.
Contributor: Adviser: Vera Paster
Date: 1992
Language: English
Publisher: City University of New York.
Subject: Psychology, Social | Psychology, Developmental | Anthropology, Cultural
Abstract: This study compared a psychological explanation of friendship to that of a sample of young adults in urban New York culture. The data supported the hypothesis that friendships form and remain close because of shared change. The data substantiated that participants linguistically organize their relationships to indicate close and far patterns of interaction. Finally the data demonstrate that friends use common themes and utterances to describe themselves.;The three hypotheses of this study support a generalizable theory of friendship. Friend relationships help consolidate future goals, current life and past experience into one life history. The cognitive and emotional aspects of personhood are organized into oppositional categories of inner or outer. The different types of intimacy in friend relationships emulate the linguistically expressed conceptual dichotomies between inner (closer) and outer (far) types of intimacy. Friends create a shared language which gives meaning to and thereby resolves the experiential contradictions of personhood.
Type: dissertation
Source: PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
degree: Ph.D.