Managing disputes in young adult friendships: Modes of convenience, cooperation, and commitment

This paper investigates how young adult friends communicatively manage their interpersonal disputes. We examined the videotaped interaction of six pairs of disputing friends as well as each participant's subsequent, independently‐offered comments on the videotape of their discussion. We found that the friends in this study did not uniformly deal with their differences. Rather, three relationally constituted modes of dispute management, termed convenience, cooperation, and commitment, were identified. These modes were based on an interpretive analysis and comparison of the friendship pairs’ discursive practices and patterns of interpersonal perception.