Friends, Family, and Family Friends: Predicting Friendships of Dutch Women

Friends are important for well-being, yet who people consider to be friends is much less evident. With a novel method to examine social relationships while decreasing respondent burden (GENSI), we obtained detailed information on 25 relationships of each of the 706 respondents from a representative sample of Dutch women (age 18-40). Specifically, we examined: i) which kind of personal relations were most often identified as friends, ii) to what extent relationship strength measured by closeness and frequency of contact (face-to-face and other forms) could predict friendships, and iii) whether... Mehr ...