| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"maff" |
| Date: |
18 Jul 2006 04:32:23 AM |
| Object: |
OT: Liz Spencer |
The ideas interview: Liz Spencer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1822837,00.html
What role do friendships play in society? John Sutherland talks to the
sociologist who is unearthing what best friends are for
Tuesday July 18, 2006
The Guardian
How many friends do you have? How important are friends in your life?
How important is friendship to the health of a nation? These are the
kind of questions that Liz Spencer (with colleague Ray Pahl) has been
investigating. It's a subject that their discipline, sociology, has
largely neglected, leaving it to the novelists and agony aunts. Their
findings, as recorded in their forthcoming monograph, Rethinking
Friendship, require us to do just that. Rethink.
Liz Spencer
http://news.google.com/news?num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=%22Liz%20Spencer%22&btnG=Search&sa=N&tab=gn
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&q=%22Liz+Spencer%22&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=nw
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Liz+Spencer%22&btnG=Search+Directory&hl=en&cat=gwd%2FTop
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=%22Liz+Spencer%22&start=0&scoring=d&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&
.
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| User: "stoney" |
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| Title: Re: OT: Liz Spencer |
02 Aug 2006 09:26:28 PM |
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On 18 Jul 2006 02:32:23 -0700, "maff" <maff91@yahoo.com> wrote in
alt.atheism
The ideas interview: Liz Spencer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1822837,00.html
What role do friendships play in society? John Sutherland talks to the
sociologist who is unearthing what best friends are for
Tuesday July 18, 2006
The Guardian
How many friends do you have? How important are friends in your life?
How important is friendship to the health of a nation? These are the
kind of questions that Liz Spencer (with colleague Ray Pahl) has been
investigating. It's a subject that their discipline, sociology, has
largely neglected, leaving it to the novelists and agony aunts. Their
findings, as recorded in their forthcoming monograph, Rethinking
Friendship, require us to do just that. Rethink.
Just what kind of shape is British friendship in, I ask Spencer. "In
quite good shape," she replies. "It's difficult to make sweeping
statements, but one of the things we challenge in our research is the
idea that friendship, nowadays, is fleeting or unimportant; that
friends, in modern life, are things casually picked up and dropped. Of
course, some friendships are like that. They always have been. But
others are incredibly enduring."
How important is friendship to society generally? "Very important. If
you consider that people don't necessarily nowadays live next to their
families, or even get on with their families, then friendship becomes a
vital lifeline. There are plenty of studies besides ours showing that
levels of friendship correlate strongly with mental and physical
health."
Was friendship stronger in the past than it is today? "I would argue
quite the opposite. The fact that friends are "chosen" relationships
rather than "given", like family relationships, might lead you to think
that they are casual, that we pick them up and drop them carelessly. But
friendship as supportive as anything you get from a family is very much
a fact of modern life."
Can you measure degrees, or intensities of friendship? "It's extremely
hard to measure using traditional survey techniques. When people say,
'I've got X number of friends,' you don't know how precisely they're
using the term. Are they, for example, being expansive - 'I'm friends
with everyone'? You can't easily work out what's going on behind the
figures."
How then do you get to grips with the topic? "By talking to people for a
long time. There's no easy checklist of questions you can tick off. Ours
was a qualitative study based on 60 of these in-depth interviews. We
covered a wide social, gender and age range with our subjects. We also
looked at different regions of the country. What we aimed for was a
representative cross-section. What we found is that it's very, very
difficult to pin things down and say, for example, that the working
class are "warmer" and more friendly. That kind of generalisation is
nonsense.
"One of our main arguments is that friendship involves a complex
interplay of factors. Background has something to do with it. Sex has
something to do with it. Class has something to do with it. Also, some
cultures place a huge emphasis on the importance of family, for example,
which is where they look for intimacy, rather than friendship."
Can you be friendly with people in your own family, or is that a
contradiction in terms? "Yes, you certainly can. The idea of suffusion,
for example parental relationships co-existing with friendly relations,
is one of our themes. For many people the boundaries between friends and
family are quite blurred. They'll describe, for instance, a sister, as
their "best friend". And vice versa: someone might describe a close
friend as "like a sister to me".
Can you be in love with someone, and be friendly with them at the same
time? Or is that another contradiction in terms? "I think you can.
Partners are a very interesting hybrid between friends and family. Parts
of the relationship - looking after the kids, for example - is familial.
But there can be the companionship element as well, which is more like
friendship. You have to beware of stereotypes. One of the reasons we
undertook this research was to question the thinking in current debates
about, you know, 'the collapse of community' - things that depend on
sweeping generalisations. Where friendship is concerned, generalisation
doesn't work.
"Among the people we looked at we found that some had a broad repertoire
of friends - whom they fall back on for different things. Other people
just have the one friend, their 'mate'. Some people make their friends
at a particular stage in their lives. Others make friends at all stages
and discard the earlier ones - they're serial friend-makers. There are
still others who gradually gather a loyal and growing corps of friends
around them as they pass through life."
A part from the fact that it's all very complicated, what other
conclusions have you drawn from your research? "The key thing is that
people live in very different kinds of personal communities and that
some of those personal communities seem to be rather more robust, if you
like to put it that way, than others."
Is friendship, then, the glue that holds these personal communities
together? "It's more a case of having a range of different people that
you can go to, both family and friends. That's the key to a robust
personal community. If you're totally dependent on a partner, or totally
dependent on immediate family, and something happens to that partner or
immediate family, you haven't got these other resources. If you've got a
broader repertoire of relationships, including friends, that's a much
healthier situation."
Are we, as a society, getting lonelier, more friendless? "It's important
to realise that there's more than one kind of social capital. It doesn't
help to conclude from the observation that people are bowling alone, or
that membership of tennis clubs is falling, that everyone's become more
selfish and lonely. You have to look deeper at the kind of relationships
and commitments that people actually have with each other. Community at
large may be getting lonelier - more solitary bowling - but personal
communities, based on friendship, are still possible and can still be
incredibly strong."
Do robust personal communities make for social cohesion generally - the
health of the nation, so to speak? "That's the million-dollar question.
We feel we've just opened the lid on the issue."
Are you hopeful about the future of friendship? "I would say that
friendship is definitely alive and well, but it takes many different
forms".
· Liz Spencer is a research associate of the Institute for Social and
Economic Research at the University of Essex. Rethinking Friendship:
Hidden Solidarities Today, by Liz Spencer and Ray Pahl, will be
published by Princeton University Press in September
/end
--
Fundies and trolls are cordially invited to
shove a wooden cross up their arses and rotate
at a high rate of speed. I trust you'll
be 'blessed' with a plethora of splinters.
.
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