The cramped living quarters, stressful finals and new experiences that come with college are famous for the friendships that they help create. It’s a place where you can find both like-minded people and polar opposites that could become life long friends, business partners, or even spouses.
But what influences you to forge these friendships? Recent sociological studies indicate there are 2 factors that hold steady when you’re making friends in college.
Friendship Factors: Race/Heritage and Proximity
After conducting research based on emails sent between students at Dartmouth College, researcher Bruce Sacerdote found what other sociologists have long been suggesting; that a person’s race or heritage - as well as their proximity or closeness with another person - affects their chances of forming friendships.
Sacerdote analyzed a number of factors, including not only race and the distance students lived from each other but also the student’s hometown, whether they attended private or public school, and their Greek system association, among other things.
The race/heritage factor is obvious in the part it plays. It gives two people a common ground to both identify with and use as a way to connect with the other person. It can also feed into the hobbies and interests of a person which are less notable but nonetheless significant factors in the people you befriend. The inclusion of hobbies and interests can minimize the race/heritage factor, which is just a jumping off point for creating relationships with others.
The proximity aspect, or the idea of being in the right place at the right time to meet someone, is more of a wild card. It’s also seems to greatly affect how many close friends we have today.
Americans Are Finding Fewer Confidants They Can Lean On
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2006 study published in The American Sociological Review revealed some interesting trends concerning how Americans go about making friends. Based off research conducted over two decades at Duke University and Arizona State University, sociologists found that students have fewer close friends now than they did in the late 1980s.
Here’s a snapshot of what they discovered:
- The number of confidants that we can discuss important issues with dropped from a mean of 2.94 in 1985 to just 2.08 in 2004.
- The number of people who said they had no one to discuss important issues with has doubled since 1985 to nearly 25% of people.
- Americans are citing fewer family and non-family confidants.
- Non-family confidants have seen the largest drop.
- Number of people who discuss important issues only with family members jumped from 57% to around 80%.
- People citing at least one person of another race as being a close confidant rose from about 9% to more than 15%.
Why Are Americans Finding Fewer Close Friends?
There are several theories about why Americans feel they have fewer close friends to share their lives with, including the facts that people are working more and families are spreading themselves out across the country.
However, a strong hypothesis goes back to the factor of proximity. As we spend more times on our computers and on social networking sites we are losing the valuable in-person exchanges that forge bonds between people. As you sit in front of your computer now you are losing opportunities to meet new people.
In our world it’s not always what you know, but who you know that can make the difference. Mastering the art of networking and having meaningful discussions with others face-to-face are some of the biggest benefits of college.
So get out there and start building your network. Today it may just get you a party invite, but in the future it could mean having an in for landing the perfect job.