The Study On The Paths Of Friendship Construction

Friendship has been treated as the precious emotion of human being by sophists both western and eastern country. Based on the interviews of 6 collegians, this paper adopts both static and dynamic ways to explore the interviewees’ path of friendship construction. With the method of category analysis, this paper finds the interviewees’ construction of friendship’s structures, forms and development patterns through ‘external-path’ and ‘internal-path’. Specifically speaking, to distinguish the friendship with other types of interpersonal relations, the interviewees adopt the external-path to construct the external-structure of friendship on three dimensions: Affective-Instrumental, Voluntary-Compulsory, and Disclosure-Closed. Besides, the internal-structure deriving from their construction from internal-path contains two dimensions: Emotion Exchange and Homophily Selection, which also benefits for clearing four basic forms of friendship. What’s more, every interviewee and each friend of theirs can be an independent case and there can be 31 groups of case, among which have three patterns of friendship development: the Gradual Development, the Fracture Development and the Reversal Development. After the static analysis of interviewees’ construction, I try to interpret the interviewees’ construction of dynamic friendship development, combining the interviewees’ story with the framework of Ritual Interaction with the application of context analysis. Here comes some interpretations:1) the Gradual Development is pushed by the Ritual Interaction running from Ritual for Pleasure to Ritual for Sharing and to Ritual for Solidarity, which can be the process of accumulation of Emotion Energy; 2) The Fracture Development can be account for the identity isolation or the emotion closure from the Ritual for Publics or for the emotional fracture from the differences of Ritual for Settle the Conflictions; 3) the phenomenon of emotional repel in the Reversal Development can be presented clearly through Ritual for Reflection. Thus, the conclusion of this paper can be that the friendship refers to a kind of Affective Solidarity constructed both by the personalities and the situations.