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Studying friendship: Experimental and role‐playing techniques in testing hypotheses about acquaintance
Author(s) -
McCarthy Barry,
Duck Steve
Publication year - 1979
Publication title -
british journal of social and clinical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.479
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8260
pISSN - 0007-1293
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8260.1979.tb00340.x
Subject(s) - friendship , generalizability theory , psychology , social psychology , relation (database) , face (sociological concept) , realism , developmental psychology , epistemology , sociology , philosophy , social science , database , computer science
A theoretically interesting development in recent work on acquaintance is the finding that duration of relationship is related to responses to attitudinal agreement/disagreement (McCarthy & Duck, 1976, 1977). These studies, however, employed variants of the bogus stranger technique in which real interactions with partners did not occur, raising doubts about the generalizability of the findings. Two studies were therefore conducted in which pairs of same‐sex friends engaged in face‐to‐face discussions, in an attempt to increase mundane realism: in Study 1 subjects expressed their true opinions on a given issue, whilst their partner (who was enlisted as a confederate) either agreed or disagreed; in Study 2 both partners role‐played the encounter. The results of the two studies were highly dissimilar; previous findings were generally replicated in the experiment but not in the role play, in which few significant effects were observed. Findings were discussed in relation to ethical issues in research on personal relationships, and in terms of the potential contributions of both experimental and role‐playing techniques to development in the understanding of acquaintance.