http://www.physorg.com/news92508891.html

"This research draws upon a tradition of inquiry known as social network analysis, developed by Professor John Barnes who was based here at the Victoria University of Manchester in 1952-1953."

"SNA is able to analyse social structures using a series of algorithms and we wanted explore its application in this area and others."
This was an interesting tidbit on friendship studies. The class part was most interesting where it says the middle class casts their net the widest...when looking for friendship. That is cool, I had no idea about this, maybe societies are changing a little?

Well, all I can say is that this isn't borne out by my personal experience (as a male). It would be interesting to see any correlation between *when* in life the friendships are made and how durable they are based on that. The dozen or so really good friends I made in my late teens are still my closest, and we're all in our late 40s now. A couple of them have become more distant or more closer to the rest of us as a group over the years, usually if a job takes them far away, or if they're involved in a new family, but nobody's just "dropped off the face of the earth." Conversely, I've known several women who go through friends like they do clothes.

Anecdotally from my own experience, this study seems to have bias in some way that is skewing the result. All the women I know (with the exception of young girls) don’t have very many friends at all and seem to lose them in dramatic fashions (stealing of a boyfriend, flirting with a husband, saying something horrible behind the back, etc). This seems to hold true regardless of the situation in which they are friends: “going out on the town friends”, “work friends”, “knew you growing up friend” etc. The men I know, in general, seem to have 1) More total friends 2) Longer lasting friendships 3) Rules of engagement “Man Laws” 4) Make friends in more settings “the gym”, “golf course”, “Strip Club”, “Hunting trip”, “Industry associations”, “Business Development”, etc 5) When men do end a friendship, which seems to be more rare, its usually just a matter of losing touch or moving on with their life in some way (i.e. the girlfriend refuses to hang out with “Frank the Tank”)

If they are defining friendship as: spilling your guts, total phone minutes spent talking about nothing, venting about their problems, and time spent shopping or analyzing shoes – then I think the women got us beat. The alcohol analysis is so unfair because so many activities that men do have a drinking component – that doesn’t mean the time spent wasn’t meaningful. I think the authors of this study should watch the movie “Good Will Hunting” again, because I don’t know of many women that have friends that care so deeply about them (loyalty) that they would “take a baseball bat to your head, if only asked”.

I think your study is completely wrong. Friendship among women is balance of terror. Only the mean and aggressive ones are able to have social life by forming alliances. Decent, nice women always get picked on and are very lonely and sad.
Ann