Adult Friendships

In my view, the knowledge about friendship among children and adolescents is richer than the knowledge about adult friendships. However, given high rates of divorce and geographical (or relational) distance among family members, friends and acquaintance are crucial for our integration in life and society. I am working on patterns of these friendships, where do we make friends, and how do these relationships exactly look like? Interestingly, it seems that in our modern times, friendships are not so important for practical things anymore: while practical help such as doing jobs in the house or garden are largely outsourced, friends are before all important for identity confirmation, companionship and advice. Further, good friends are almost as close to another than marriage partners. However, unlike marriages, friendships do not end abruptly, we rather let them go gradually. Which means of course that we can get them back!

Networks Through The Life Course

How do our networks change through the life course? We do know from research that networks seem to shrink if we become older. Given that most people also work less and become less active at higher ages this is a plausible finding. We do not know, however, whether and how relationships change in quality and in the social capital they provide. Maybe, high quality contacts compensate for decrease in quantity. This implies that social resources do not change through the life course; they rather might grow in value. This project studies these changes in relationships and resources for different social categories and through the life course. Networks might not change in the same way for everybody, e.g., men and women, high and lower educated might differ in this regard.

Neighborhood Effects On Individual Behavior

As a sociologist, I am interested in context effects for individual behavior. Individual action is not only driven by own preferences and goals but the surrounding context also determines what people do. A perfect research site to study this claim is the residential neighborhood. Do neighborhood contexts and the composition of people, who live there, matter for the behavior of passengers? More in detail, are people more inclined to do favors for a stranger in neighborhoods, when social norms concerning collective efficacy are tight and the neighborhood is more advantaged in general? The answer is ‘yes’: in a number of field-experiments we were able to show that people behave more prosocial in neighborhoods with high collective efficacy, i.e. the shared norm that everyone will intervene on behalf of common goods.