“Friend Moments”: A Discursive Study of Friendship

Abstract

The current study adopted an interactional perspective toward friendship and directly explored how pairs of self-identified friends practice friendship within a research conversation. Twelve pairs of young adult friends were interviewed together about their friendship, and the transcripts were analyzed using discourse analysis. During the interviews, participants performed their friendship in particular identifiable moments (i.e., friend moments) by addressing each other directly and drawing on locally shared resources (i.e., a shared personally relevant history, context, and resources), positioning themselves as insiders (i.e., friends), while the interviewer took up a position as an outsider (i.e., a nonfriend or stranger), often by remaining silent. Exploring friend moments revealed the plausibility of viewing friendship as actively interactional and nontrivially relational. Friend moments represent a particular kind of friendship talk where speakers accomplish the task of doing friendship in interaction, in personally relevant and situationally appropriate ways.

Keywords:

• discourse analysis
• discursive psychology
• friendship
• research interviews
• subject positions