CSU's The Audit

INTRO: Welcome to Colorado State University's podcast The Audit, where host Stacy Nick talks with CSU faculty about topics ranging from their latest research to current events.

HOST STACY NICK: There are lots of different types of friends. Best friends, work friends. Facebook friends, even frenemies. Each has an important role in our lives that has been shown to impact our mental and physical health. The American Friendship Project is a new program co-led by Colorado State University communication studies researcher Natalie Pennington. The annual survey provides one of the most complete looks at this highly critical but rarely studied relationship. Along with University of Kansas professor Jeffrey Hall and Michigan State professor Amanda Holmstrom. Pennington recently published a two-year study that found that despite earlier research showing American friendships were in peril. We actually have more friends than previously believed. More importantly, we're pretty happy with the number of friends we have. We just want to spend more time with them. Today, I'm speaking with Pennington about the American Friendship Project, what they've learned so far and what they're hoping to learn next.

You know, I want to start with why friendship? Why is this such an important topic?

NATALIE PENNINGTON: For me personally, I think I was always interested in the question of friendship from some of my earliest studies where I was interested in social media. You know, you've got Facebook that says, that's Facebook friends. And it really started to raise this question of who is a friend? I don't know if you remember the earliest days of Facebook, like 2004, anybody would add anybody on there. And it really changed this definition of friendship. So, that was my earliest interest. And then specifically with the American Friendship Project, Jeff is the one who came up with the idea. So, Jeff Hall, University of Kansas, one of my colleagues, was my advisor when I was in my PhD program. He came to me and Mandy Holmstrom, who's our third person, Michigan State and said, you know, I have this idea. I think that, you know, we have these annual studies of family, people really focus a lot on romantic relationships, and yet we aren't talking about friendship. And there's this gap there that isn't being talked about. And especially when we think about how valuable on a local level, we know friendship and connection are. It seemed like a good space to sort of step into. For us, the American Friendship Project was saying there's value in an annual survey of social connection in the United States, and in doing so, really starting to stress the importance of things like understanding the structure of people's networks, understanding how over time there's a longitudinal component. So over time, how changes in our relationships might affect our well-being. Things like life satisfaction, loneliness, stress, connection, disconnection. And so, we were really excited to say, you know, here's a chance for someone to be doing this and saying, you know, this is important. One of the pieces that I think in particular stuck out to Jeff and certainly resonated the most with me, is that you were starting to see, especially following the pandemic, a lot of discussion about loneliness. Right. So, you have the Surgeon General saying there's a loneliness epidemic right now and seeing social connection as a problem. And so, we were like, okay, well, here's, you know, this is the problem. How can we fulfill and sort of better understand that. And as communication scholars knowing that connection is very much hand-in-hand with communication. And then you also had a couple of different public reports that said people don't have as many friends as they used to, and we felt like how they defined friendship was kind of narrow. So, one of the opportunities with the American Friendship Project that we were really excited about and is shared in this article, is saying, let's talk about measurement. How do we define a friend, right? Right. Back to that question about Facebook friends. What is a friend? How do we characterize that? And giving our participants the chance to say, how did they define it? Where do they come from? And that was something we were really excited about.

HOST: Now you mentioned this paper. So, let's tell people what we're talking about.

PENNINGTON: Jeff, Mandy and I published in PLOS ONE an article that really introduces the public to the American Friendship Project. So, it's saying here's our first two years of findings. Broad picture explains why we think it's important to study friendship, why we're doing what we're doing. Some of our future plans. It also makes the data public. So that's one of the things that we were excited about was to say it's not just our data, but other people can come in and start to ask some questions about this as well. And so, in the survey and in the article, we are thinking about the structure of people's networks, asking people how happy they are with their friendship networks. We're talking and checking in on their well-being, reflecting on things like does loneliness and friendship look different for older versus younger participants?

HOST: I think that's interesting because in college and in high school, when you have that structure, it's very easy to meet friends. You meet some of your best friends. But once you get out of college and as you get older, it becomes a lot harder to make friends and to keep friends.

PENNINGTON: Yeah, and, you know, that's actually one of the things that's really interesting with the article that's coming out and some future articles we're working on. So, in the main article, we do have a lot of tables that break down really approachable statistics for people. So, averages, percentages, just to say here's how it's looking. And so, you do get to see, yeah absolutely, the college students have way more friends. They're much more likely to say they have friends when you look at those side by side. But when you dig deeper into the data, you actually find out that college students are the most connected but are also the most disconnected. So, it's this really interesting sort of juxtaposition of the two.

HOST: Does that have something to do with social media?

PENNINGTON: We don't make strong claims about technology in that article. So, there is another one that yeah, it's such a big data set. This is part of why we're excited to have it out there for folks is to say, like, here's a chance for you know, oh, you're interested in that? Well, you could go look at that. We absolutely asked questions about social media so you could test and see. And in this case, part of the argument we're making is that it's just a it's a time of change and transition. Right. So high connection, high disconnection co-occurring at the same time in large part because it is differences. Right. You're moving to college so suddenly you don't maybe be as close to family and your high school friends. So, there's that sense of loss but also gain. Or as you're, you know, you're a senior and you're setting out, now I'm about to graduate again, some of those feelings of loss like, oh, I'm not gonna be around these people all the time anymore as you move into adulthood.

HOST: You know, the pandemic and the lockdown made a lot of people reevaluate their friendships and their need for them. It kind of put our need for friendships into really sharp focus.

PENNINGTON: And, you know, that's the first time Jeff and Mandy and I actually wrote together as a trio was during the pandemic. So as people who have studied social connection and friendship and relationships, Mandy's focus is social support. Jeff has really been big on friendship. I've been interested in technology. All three kind of came together really nicely, so we had an article that was published out of 2020 to say, like, here's this prime opportunity to see our different relationships, how different technologies interacted. And you're right that, like, the pandemic, definitely had an influence on our well-being and our connection with other people, right? Especially when you think about outside of the home, you just didn't get the chance to talk to folks as much. And so, you had people who lost friendships. In the first year of the American Friendship Project, one of the things that we talk about in the article is the opportunity for some rotating questions. So, we do have some questions that show up in the first year that aren't in the second year, or some things that are in the second year, some adjustments as we go. And in the first year we did ask a couple pandemic-related questions. So, you'll see those reflected in the tables as well, where we said, did you feel like you lost friends as a result of the pandemic, or did you have friendships get closer? And so, it was both, right? So, for some people were like, yeah, my more distant weak tie connections. I just didn't have the time and capacity for that. And it kind of fell off. Right? If somebody was starting to make friends in a class and now your class is online, you just don't have the chance to connect. But your closest friends, you actually kind of strengthen those because now suddenly you can't see each other. We have this need to belong to each other. We're reaching out and deepening a few connections, even though we might lose some as well.

HOST: Now, you have discussed previously the idea of friendship snacks. I want to that feels like kind of a good place to talk about that. What does that mean?

PENNINGTON: So, friendship snacks is this idea that we don't always have to have big, deep conversations or spend large chunks of time with people we care about. It acknowledges that there are small ways we can connect and reach out. Right. So, one of the things that we talk about in this article is that 75% of people were happy with the number of friends they have, which is really important because a lot of data tends to be like, oh my gosh, people to have enough friends. So, people are actually pretty happy with the number of friends. They weren't happy with the time they could spend with their friends.

HOST: They weren't as close?

PENNINGTON: It wasn't even a question of closeness. I feel close to you, but I just like I don't get to spend the time with you that I wish I could. Right and think about adulthood, competing obligations make it harder to spend time together. So, friendship snacks is this idea to say, well, here's how we can get that connection. Instead of assuming that the only way is for us to have, you know, a get together every week, saying I can reach out and text you a funny meme, I could say, hi, you know, there's some of that more what we call mundane maintenance can get some connection for us without feeling like it has to be this big thing. And obviously those things are fun and great, right? We want to be able to connect face to face. We want to be able to spend time together. But in the absence of that, knowing that there are little ways we can connect - sending emails, sending a text message, phone call, voice memo those are ways that we can sustain that relationship.

HOST: I heard that it takes 200 hours to solidify a friendship. That feels like a lot of time. Does friendship snacking play into that?

PENNINGTON: That's Jeff’s study. Yeah. So, Jeff wrote an article, How Many Hours to Make a Friend, and tracked people over the course of a semester to see, you know, let's pick somebody who you just started to connect with and see how many hours you're spending together. And yeah, it can take a lot of hours to get to friendship. But if you think about it again, especially right with college, let's say you're roommates. You picked your new college roommate, you got paired together. You can get to 200 hours pretty fast when you live together or if you're, you know, have the same class schedules or you're on a sports team together. So, you're always at practice several days a week and playing games, right? So, lots of opportunities for us to get there. And that's even just talking about getting from acquaintance to friend. As we get closer to the close friend/best friend status, even higher.

HOST: You mentioned you kind of focus on the technology side of things. So, let's talk a little bit about how we maintain those friendships in this busy climate. You mentioned friendship snacking, and I know that there's a lot of folks that will say that technology has made us more distant. In some ways, it's brought us together. It's that weird dichotomy of, has it brought us closer, or has it brought us further apart? Where does that fall in our maintenance of friendships?

PENNINGTON: Yeah. And again, I'll say in this article, we don't make any claims about its effects. So, we do offer one of the things. There's a table that sort of breaks down how often people are using things. And I think that it's really interesting to see how different types of technology are used. Obviously, diving into that data and working on some other articles and other studies I've done, we know that there are some technologies that can be pretty effective pretty consistently, but other times where it might be a little messier. One example that I'll point to that I think we're seeing pretty consistently across articles is texting is something that people love to do. You're going to see texting is one of those highest number used by everyone. But texting actually doesn't really help us that much. Doesn't necessarily cause harm. But you know, if I'm feeling lonely, then a text might not do as much as, say, a phone call. So that richer medium where I get to hear somebody's voice can be really nice.

HOST: That feels like to this younger generation, like an assault almost, because no one wants to answer their phones.

PENNINGTON: People hate talking on the phone. It's really funny to me, and it's one of the things I almost always talk about in my classes. As I say, you know, I know you want to send that text message, but like, if you've got the time. And one of the things we also offer is there's been a rise in voice memos, which I think are really fun. And that's definitely a younger generation thing. And so, if you're like, well, a phone call means that I have to like, stop what I'm doing. So, I do have that richness of the voice, but there's also the immediacy of response there, which is great. But let's say, you know, like, I don't have time. And where we live in different time zones. And so that voice memo can still get you the richness, even if it's not the immediacy. So, ways to kind of compromise a little and gain some comfort. At the same time, I'll say video calls is one that's actually been really interesting, where during the pandemic, we saw that video calls were actually kind of worse for people. You know, you expect them to be great. Everybody turned to them and people who learned how to use them. And one of the arguments that that Jeff and Mandy and I made in the article we published was saying, you know, maybe it's a little bit of like an uncanny valley. I see you; I hear you and I in the call and I'm reminded that we're not there with each other. So, it almost like I get that high, only to go back down again. With a text or phone call. I know we're not in the same space, so I don't have quite that fall back down afterwards.

HOST: I kind of want to go back to something and we talked about it. But I'm going to ask this question again why are friendships so important? What is it about that relationship?

PENNINGTON: For us, the question of friendship was to say this is a voluntary connection, right? So, when we think about the family we're born into, people say things like blood is thicker than water. We choose our friends. We say, okay, I'm going to stay connected to this person. And so, for us, it was that chance to better understand that. At the same time, what's really interesting is, you know, it's researchers who say it's voluntary. But if you ask participants or, you know, the public to define friendship, that's not one of the first words they use. And so, for us, it was trying to sort of weave through that space to understand who our friends are as a starting point, how are we defining and thinking about them? How many do we have? And then is there anything about them that's helpful? And we know big picture they are. A lot of our daily interactions are not with our closest ties. We tend to spend time around our broader network. And so that's where a lot of friends can come into play. So, in this case, it was a really fun opportunity to understand that a little bit more.

HOST: You mentioned that some studies have come out saying that we're very lonely and you're finding that's not the case. How do you define a friendship?

PENNINGTON: We took a very broad definition of friendship, where it was really from the start saying, you know, who do you consider a friend? How do you define friendship? And one of the things that we talk about in the article that we're really excited to keep exploring was actually a change we made between the first year and the second year that exploded people's networks. So, in the first year of the study, at the start of the survey, people did their demographics, and then the very first question was, what are three things that would make you call somebody a friend? Pretty common answers to that are things like trustworthy, loyal, honest. And then in the next question we said, okay, give us the names or initials of up to seven people you would call a friend. And what we found was that, you know, in that first question, people are really idealizing friendship again, right? Honest, trustworthy, loyal. And that's maybe what I would say about my best friend. I don't know that I would know those things are true of a more distant connection. And so, people were giving us fewer names. In year two, the very first question said, how many friends do you have? Zero friends, 1 to 5 friends, 6 to 10 friends, up to 51 plus friends. And then after that question, we said. All right. Give us the names or initials of up to. Right. And we found that people reported way more friendships in year two. And what we were capturing there, if you look at sort of how that breaks down, because in addition to being like, okay, give us the names or initials, we said, okay, well, who is this person to you? And that's where they could say, it's a casual friend. It's a close friend. It's a best friend. Maybe it's a parent. It's a child. It's a sibling. It's somebody I work with. There's another category where people can write in, you know, whatever they want to put there. And we ended up capturing a lot more of that bigger network in year two, which I was especially excited about as somebody who thinks, again, if we think about sort of that snacking connection building. My daily interactions aren't always with my best friend. And so how can I better understand how I'm connecting and communicating with all those other people in my life as well? So, for us, we kept friendship very, very broad and some people are going to push back against that. Right? So, like you could say, your romantic partner is a friend, they could be on that list. And some people were like, no, my romantic partner is my romantic partner, and my friend is my friend. But we allowed that opportunity to say, you know, there is a percentage of people that are saying that, right? Or people who are saying, like, my sibling is my best friend and trying to perfectly separate those two is not accurate of the public. You know, one of the things that I'll add as well that I'm excited about with this data set is that, you know, I mentioned people could say, I know I don't have friends, I don't. And one of the ways we sought to capture this was to follow up with that. Okay. Well, do you have people that you have regular, enjoyable interactions with because it does start to capture that again, like maybe you have a high definition of what the word means. So, you're not willing to say you have a friend, but you might be interacting with people and having communication that's still good for your well-being. And so, if we get back to that connection between communication and wellness, then I might still be talking to people and actually be doing just fine. My threshold of saying this person's my friend could be quite a bit higher but helps us capture some of that. And then even participants were like, no, still, we still have other questions. We're like, all right. You know, there's still a whole other set of questions we're going to talk to you about. In some cases, people said, well, I don't have any friends. I'm older, my friends have passed away. So, I don't know why I don't have friends. And so really trying to understand sort of that subset as well is it space that we're trying to build out from.

HOST: That kind of flies in the face of some previous research. And you mentioned that earlier, previously, other researchers have said that we don't have as many friends. And that's a big problem in this country. Is this a big problem from what you're seeing?

PENNINGTON: Yeah. We don't think it is. You know, I feel pretty comfortable saying that for us, at least right now. What we're finding is that we're capturing a broader sense of someone's social network. And, you know, this is consistent with other research, right? So, there's Gillian Sandstrom, who studies weak ties, and she has a lot of really fantastic research that talks about the strength of those relationships in our day to day and helping with our well-being. Right. You talk to your barista while you get a coffee, that can actually give you a daily mood boost. And so, for us, we're sort of saying, let's keep it broader in defense of some of these other studies. So, for instance, there is a Pew Research article that came out that said pretty consistent with an earlier study about the smaller number of friends. But if you go and look at their statistics, they're saying close friends. And then I think what happens is media sees that and they've put a headline of people have fewer friends! Like, well, again, how are we defining that word? If we say close friends, okay, people might not have as many close friends. I do think our data supports a little in terms of the, I'm happy with the number I wish I could spend more time. But we're still trying to sort of track and understand that a little bit more. And so, for us, it's that space to say, you know, what are we doing? How are we communicating and spending time with, and what does that time look like? And these other studies have narrowed that a little bit more. And I think that that's that missed opportunity.

HOST: I think it's really fascinating. And you talked a little bit about this beginning, but the idea of we have so many areas where we're studying family and other relationships, but friendship is something that we maybe haven't dipped into as much.

PENNINGTON: And I do think it's the fuzziness of the term. And even before, you know, we could attribute to Facebook certainly making it harder to say we're friending people. But I think people have always struggled a little to say, like, what makes somebody a friend? What's the threshold? And that's maybe easier when we're kids, right? The example of saying, you know, like, everybody's my friend at school, but especially once you - so it's a 25 is when your network starts to shrink a little. It can be harder to make new friends, harder to understand, like what's the level of friendship? How do we think about those? What if I think they're my friend but they don't think they're my friend? And so.

HOST: Awkward...

PENNINGTON: Yeah, it's. Yeah. And, you know, part of that is it doesn't really matter. Like, if you enjoy talking to that person and you get benefits from it, then you benefit from it, right? And again, just like how we define that thing might be a little different for some people.

HOST: While you've been working on this, has it changed how you view your friendships?

PENNINGTON: I think it's hard not to study something and try to implement some of those actions in your own day to day life, right? One of my biggest ones that I think I've tried to catch myself on, specifically that I've seen across a few different studies, is this idea of passive versus active use of technology. So not just reading things, but actually talking to people. So, commenting, liking, engaging, and especially people who have maybe haven't talked to in a while, right? Like instead of just scrolling past, like, oh my gosh, that thing is so cool. Like, say the thing you're thinking and talk to those people, and it can be a really fun opportunity to reconnect in some ways.

HOST: Well, thank you so much for being here today. This was really a fascinating conversation.

PENNINGTON: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

OUTRO: That was CSU Communication Studies Assistant Professor Natalie Pennington, talking about her recent study as part of the American Friendship Project. I'm your host, Stacy Nick. And you're listening to CSU's The Audit.