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62 Soc. F. 124 (1983-1984)
A Research Note on Friendship, Gender, and the Life Cycle

handle is hein.journals/josf62 and id is 144 raw text is: A Research Note on Friendship, Gender, and the Life Cyde* CLAUDE S. FISCHER, University of California, Berkeley STACEY J. OLIKER, University of California, Berkeley Studies increasingly suggest that the personal relations of men and women differ. In this note we present data which show that differences between the friendships of men and of women are conditional upon stage in the life cycle, and we argue that this interaction effect is evidence for both a struc- tural and dispositional explanation of behavioral differences between the sexes. Explaining Gender and Social Relations There are essentially two approaches to the study of how men's and wom- en's social relations differ: dispositional and structural. Dispositional ap- proaches explain gender differences in social relations by ongoing inclina- tions which originate in biology, culture, or early or adult socialization. Structural approaches explain gender differences by the different positions women and men typically occupy in the social system, and their differing access to economic, political, and ideological resources of power and privi- lege. Purely structural explanations explain behavioral differences by the direct, uninternalized effects of social structure. Dispositional explanations have been the most frequent approach to gender contrasts in social re- lations. We propose that gender differences in friendships emerge most sharply in particular periods of the life course, periods which offer very *This paper is a report of the Northern California Community Study, sponsored by the Center for Studies of Metropolitan Problems, N.I.M.H. (Grant #MH-26802). It is abbreviated from an earlier version presented at the 1980 meeting of the American Sociological Association. Further discussion and details may be found in Fischer and Oliker and in Fischer. The data are available to researchers through the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Re- search at the University of Michigan. Much of the senior author's work on this paper was supported by a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and as a Visiting Professor at the Center for Population Studies, Harvard University. Comments by Ann Stueve and Ann Swidler were especially helpful. 01983 The University of North Carolina Press 124

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