Friends' and Acquaintances' Conversations II: Coded Differences

Abstract

This is the second of a pair of studies investigating differences between friends' and acquaintances' conversations. In Study I (Planalp & Benson, 1992), naive judges were asked to indicate whether they thought conversations were between friends or acquaintances and why. In Study Il (reported here), the same conversations were analyzed to determine if the reasons given by judges in Study I did, in fact, discriminate between friends and acquaintances when coded from the conversations and analyzed statistically. Results indicated that the pattern of differences was consistent with Study I, although only a few differences were significant statistically due to low power. Discriminant analyses indicated that two variables alone, mutual knowledge and continuity, predicted friends/acquaintances' differences as well as the entire set of variables and with the same level of accuracy (about 80 percent) as the judges in Study 1.

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