286 Benefits and Maintenance of Friendships
A Prototype Approach
My own stance comes closest to those who look for the typical characteristics.
I have been influenced by discussions of classical versus prototype definitions
(e.g., Fehr, 1988). According to a more traditional approach, friendship has a set
of defining attributes and only relationships manifesting all those properties qual-
ify as a friendship. According to the prototype approach, the features of friend-
ship form a fuzzy set— qualities typically found in friendship but not always
necessarily there.
Each of these approaches has its advantages and disadvantages, but I lean
toward the prototype view. For me, the typical— but not universally present—
characteristics (or paradigm case) approach reflects the way life really is — a bit
messy. The assumptions of classical definitions are that scholars can agree on char-
acteristics of the entity being defined and that each of the defining characteristics
will be manifest in any case classified within the defined category. These assump-
tions seem shaky to me. Friendship scholars have difficulty totally agreeing on
the attributes of friendships. Furthermore, when classical formal definitions are
advanced, I am not convinced that the defining characteristics are always present
in all the relationships that people think of as friendships. For example, in this book
friendships are depicted as involving peers and reciprocity. Nonetheless the chap-
ter on mentoring and friendship included mentor relationships cum friendships
between individuals of different status. Similarly, many of the relationships that
people identify as friendships are relationships in which partners rate themselves
as over- or underbenefited (Messman, Canary, & Hause, 2000) rather than fully
reciprocal.
Monsour notes the important point that a lack of consensus on a definition
of friendship makes comparing findings across studies difficult. While a proto-
type definition does not totally resolve this dilemma, having a model with some
variability around it may well add robustness to findings. Further, if there is a
well- articulated prototype but the prototype varies some across cultures and
time, prototype versions can be used as a moderating factor to determine whether
the changing nature of the prototype alters friendship’s association with other
variables.
The Status and Context of Friendship Research
One sometimes gets the impression that friendship is a neglected cousin in social
science research. Hojjat and Moyer justify the need for the present book saying
that there have not been any other friendship books in recent years, even though
research has been increasing. There are a few older volumes and one very recent
book on friendship and happiness (Demir, 2015), but I resonate to the editors’
point. The current, more general volume fills a noteworthy gap.