Preprint on gender and friendships.

I can’t believe that we are already 2.5 months into the new year and that I have not posted any updates - as stuff has actually happened. This brief post is to announce that we have updated our preprint. This was a project which grew out of the work by a Bachelor project student who did her project on friendships. We analysed the friendships of 215 participants (1774 friends) using multilevel modelling. In particular, we were interested in gender and emotional closeness. Men and women listed roughly the same number of friends. Both men and women listed their own gender more as potential friends - this is known as ‘homophily’. Female friends elicited greated self-disclosure, greater self-disclosure in turn was associated with greater reported emotional closeness. Interestingly, this pattern (female friends –> greater self-disclosure –> greater closeness) did not differ between male and female respndents.It is quite exploratory and preliminary but we hope it could be an interesting start for more research in this area. There are also many limitations, for example, we had more women than men take part and we only looked at a binary classification of gender. Our data and materials are available on the Open Science Framework. Similar to some other papers, it has been a very long journey, as the project started in november 2019. Thanks to Genavee Brown and Vickie Curtis for their involvement in the project. Now let’s hope that it will be published somewhere in 2021!