Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Gerontologists were responsible for much of the early scholarship on adult friendship and continue to focus more attention on it than other researchers do. This is probably due to their historical preoccupation with theoretical questions regarding older adults’ social integration, engagement, and psychological well-being. Friends are, however, important during later adulthood in many other ways as well, serving as sources of affection and social support and contributing to physical health and even to longevity. Early studies of older adult friendship tended to focus on the effects of quantity of social contact, but more recent ones focus more on predictors of friendship patterns, including their dyadic and network processes and structural characteristics. Also in contrast to the early research on older adult friendship, more recent research focuses on its negative aspects as well as on its positive aspects. Many of the original studies of older adult friendship were either ethnographies or surveys of small samples of older adults. Contemporary researchers now commonly compare the friendships of adults of various ages and sometimes examine friendship patterns longitudinally. Knowledge of why friendship patterns change over time is still limited, however, because researchers often use the variable “age” as a proxy measure for stage of life course and developmental maturity without ... log in or subscribe to read full text