Friends' and Acquaintances' Conversations I: Perceived Differences

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Abstract
Although interaction and intimacy are widely recognized as key concepts in understanding personal relationships, comprehensive theories of differences between intimate and non-intimate relationships have been grounded primarily in self-reports of general communication patterns rather than in observed interaction. This study was designed to investigate what observable cues in conversations distinguish friends' from acquaintances' conversations. Excerpts from 36 conversations were audio taped and played to observers who judged whether the conversations were between friends or acquaintances and what cues they used to make their judgments. Those cues served as the basis for an inductively derived category system. Major findings were that judges were 80 percent accurate and their judgments were based on a wide variety of cues. About half of the cues that could be coded reliably fell into three categories: mutual knowledge, intimacy of self-disclosure and relaxation. The other half, however, were dispersed across 27 other types of cues. Implications of these findings are then drawn for several existing theories and for further research.