The Structure of Adult Friendship Choices.

The article examines bias toward status-similarity in adult friendships in Detroit and a West German city. Principles of meeting and "mating," by which strangers are converted to acquaintances and acquaintances to friend, are stated. One of these, the proximity principle, claims that the more similar people are, the more likely they will meet and become friends. This principle is tested in matrices of friendship choice for twelve social characteristics. Two statistical measures of bias are used and their properties discussed. Compared to a random-choice model, adult friendships show strong bias toward status similarity for all social characteristics. Bias is strongest for "edge" categories of ranked statuses and for "best friends. The less similar two people are in social characids, the less likely they are to be close friends. Demographic characteristics tend to show more bias toward homogeneous choices than other characteristics. Most studies of friendship choice involve children or young adults, often college students. There are relatively few reports of friendship choice by adults.