288 Benefits and Maintenance of Friendships
terms. It was used in 14% of all articles. A slightly different analysis covering 1984–
2014 showed “friendship” as an index term was used in a slightly higher percentage
of articles in the first 15 years of the journal’s history (15.6%) than in the second 15
(11.3%). Clearly, friendship has been and remains a significant topic among relation-
ship scientists.
The Study of Friendship as a Multidisciplinary Endeavor
Over this 50- year period shown in Figure 17.1, “friendship” was used as a PsycInfo
index term 8,566 times, so the body of literature dealing with friendship in some
way is considerable. But the PsycInfo database, while it does cover some publications
in ancillary disciplines, is not exhaustive. Looking at the professional affiliations
of authors in the present volume shows the majority are associated with psychol-
ogy departments but there are also contributors from communications units (e.g.,
William Rawlins, William Monsour, Andrew Ledbetter) and human development
and family studies (HDFS) or child development departments (e.g., Rosemary
Blieszner, Gail E. Walton, myself ) plus a sociologist, Rebecca Adams, now chair-
ing a gerontology program. To get a broader picture than the present author list,
I checked the departmental affiliation of the first (or corresponding) author (Figure
17.2) of the 178 articles published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships
between 1984 and 2012 for which the word “friendship” was an index term. Slightly
over half the authors were from psychology departments (54%), but close to half
were from other departments (including communications, sociology, HDFS, and
education). Research on friendship is definitively a multidisciplinary endeavor.
54%9%18%8%8%3%Departmental A
liationPsychology Other Communications HDFS Sociology EducationFigure 17.2 Departmental affiliations of the first authors of articles in JSPR.