An Echo, a Hurrah, and Other Reflections 287Growth of the Friendship Scholarship
To get an indication of the growth of psychologically oriented friendship research,
I searched the PsycInfo database, which is centered on psychological publications
but also has some interdisciplinary content. I searched PsycInfo for publications with
“friendship” as either a title word or an index term. Figure 17.1 shows the growth of
friendship publications since 1965 in 5- year periods. During those 5- year periods,
the number of articles with “friendship” as a title word increased from 35 to 655 (or
7 per year to 131), and designating “friendship” as an index term increased from 38
to 2,227 (or 7.6 per year to 445.4). (The changes in index frequencies may reflect
changes in the American Psychological Association’s insistence on having index
terms starting in the mid- 1980s). As a title word, “friendship” was used consider-
ably less than “love” (2,611 times vs. 5,742), a bit more than loneliness (2,302), and
over half again as often as “marital satisfaction” (1,649).
Within psychology, there was a period when the study of interpersonal attraction
was very prominent. Here the basic goal was to find the determinants of whom we
like as friends. Many of these studies were experiments in which the researcher cre-
ated various experimental conditions and recruited strangers to come to a labora-
tory to interact for short periods of time (Huston & Levinger, 1978). The frequency
with which “interpersonal attraction” was used as an index term surpassed the fre-
quency with which “friendship” appeared as an index term in the PsycInfo database
for the period 1965– 1979. The use of the term “interpersonal attraction” has dried
to a trickle over the subsequent years, with use of the term “friendship” continuing
to grow. In the most recent 5- year period, there were 39 publications using “friend-
ship” as an index term for every one using “interpersonal attraction.”
To look at the place of the friendship literature from a different vantage point,
I counted how many times each different index term in 1,265 articles published in
the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (1984– 2012) was used. I found that
with 178 uses, “friendship” ranked eighth in frequency among nearly 1,000 index
050010001500200025001965–591970–741975–791980–841984–891990–941995–992000–042005–092010–14Articles per Five Year PeriodPeriodTitle Word
Index TermFigure 17.1 Articles with “friendship” as a title word or index term (per 5- year period).