Friends and Acquaintances

Tables 4.7, 4.8, and 4.9 present data on the restrictions that race, gender, and class impose on the development of friendships. Using a "Friends Sheet," respondents were asked to list the first names of all the people they considered their "good friends" and then to indicate the race, sex, and occupation of each friend. These questions were introduced in the interview as follows:

I would like to ask you some questions about the people you consider your good friends—by good friends I mean adults you enjoy getting together with at least once a month or so and any other adults who live elsewhere that you try to keep in close touch with by calling or writing.

Parents, spouses, and children were excluded from the sheet, in order to restrict it to affiliative behavior outside the immediate family. Eighty-eight respondents (4.6 percent) said they had no good friends; among those who did, the median number of friends was 6, with the highest emuneration of friends being 20.^[4] Following the questions about friends, respondents were asked, "Are there any other people you keep in touch with or get together with occasionally?"; if they said "Yes," they were

[4] The "Friends Sheet" and the data and composite measures derived from it are described in detail in Jackman and Jackman (1983, 173–178).

asked about the racial and gender composition of those acquaintance circles, with five response-options ranging from "All black [women]" to "All white [men]," as in the spatial-segregation items presented above. Again, the data for class are not directly comparable with those for race and gender, since they present friends' occupational status (in terms of the Duncan socioeconomic index) rather than their attributed class membership. However, we may conclude from the data in these three tables that the most severe social rift between groups exists in race relations, where spatial segregation has found its strictest application, whereas the rift is weakest in the gender relationship, where role segregation prevails. Class relations show a social rift as marked as that for race between highly disparate socioeconomic levels, but the rift is less marked between proximate socioeconomic levels.

Racial segregation in the social circles of whites and blacks is pronounced but lopsided in its experiential impact on the respective groups. Blacks are usually absent from whites' friendship circles and they appear among whites' acquaintances only somewhat more frequently. Fewer than 10 percent of whites include any blacks among their good friends, and in most cases the referent is a single black friend. Just over one-quarter of whites include blacks among their acquaintances, and in most of these cases "mostly white" is the way the acquaintances are described, which probably indicates only one black acquaintance or possibly two. Thus, although whites are almost twice as likely to include one or two

blacks among their acquaintances as among their more intimate friends, the penetration of blacks into either circle is very limited.

Blacks' social circles are less likely to be racially exclusive than are those of whites; again, because of whites' numerical advantage, there is an asymmetry in the degree to which each group penetrates the experiential world of the other. About 35 percent of blacks include whites among their friends, and these cases are almost as likely to involve two or more whites as they are to involve a single white. About one-half of blacks include whites among their acquaintances, and over 10 percent say that at least half of their acquaintances are white.

Table 4.8 presents the proportion of men's and women's friends and acquaintances who are of the same sex. People's social circles are considerably less segregated by gender than by race, but gender segregation is still fairly marked, especially in people's friendship circles. Because women's presence in men's friendship circles goes well beyond the minuscule number of blacks found in whites' circles, gender representation is measured in terms of the proportion of friends who are the same sex as the respondent, rather than the bare number.

Almost one-third of both men and women include no members of the other sex among their good friends, and the overwhelming majority have more friends of their own sex than of the other sex. This again suggests that the relatively high personal interaction experienced between the sexes in family life is somewhat circumscribed. Outside those

bounds, the close affiliative ties of men and women are more likely to involve their own sex. Interestingly, additional analyses (not presented here) indicate that men who are married are somewhat more likely than unmarried men to have friends who are exclusively or disproportionately of their own sex. For example, 33 percent of married men versus 19 percent of unmarried men have exclusively male friends. This pattern is not duplicated among women, but it suggests that, for men, once the business of finding a sexual mate is removed from the social agenda, men retreat somewhat from women's company outside the family. Sex segregation is less in evidence in acquaintance circles: about two-thirds of both sexes say that half or more of their acquaintances are of the other sex, and acquaintance circles that completely exclude the other sex are a rarity.

To assess the impact of class on the pattern of affiliative ties, I examine data on the socioeconomic status of respondents' friends. Respondents gave the occupation of each friend, and this information was used to assign a Duncan Socioeconomic Index (SEI) score to each friend. The SEI is an estimated prestige ranking of occupations that ranges from 0 to 96 (Duncan 1961). These data provide two different measures. First, I calculated the mean SEI score for the friends of each respondent, in order to have a summary measure of their socioeconomic composition. These mean SEI scores are broken into four categories, and the percentages of each class with friends in each category are presented in the first panel of table 4.9. Second, I calculated the average absolute size of the deviations of friends' SEI scores from that of the respondent (the respondent's score was based on the occupation of the head of the household), in order to measure the extent to which people have friends who are similar to them in socioeconomic status. The mean deviations are expressed in SEI points and are broken into five categories, ranging from very small mean deviations (10 SEI points or less) to large ones (30 points or more). The percentages of each class with friends in each category are presented in the second panel of table 4.9.

I begin with the first panel of table 4.9, which shows a marked association between the class of respondents and the average socioeconomic status of their friends. The percentage distributions of the upper-middle class and the poor are almost the obverse of each other, although the tendency of the poor to have low-status friends is somewhat more pronounced than the tendency of the upper-middle class to have high-status friends. Almost three-quarters of the upper-middle class have friends whose mean SEI scores fall in the top two categories (with 44 percent falling in the top category alone); and at the other end, only 5 percent of the upper-middle class have friends whose mean SEI scores fall in the lowest category. Among the poor, over 80 percent have friends whose

mean SEI scores are in the lowest two categories, with 44 percent falling in the lowest category alone. The figures for the middle and working classes fall in a gradual progression between the upper-middle class and the poor. Among middle-class respondents, almost two-thirds have friends whose mean SEI scores lie in the two middle categories, and of the two more extreme categories, their friends are more likely to be in the highest than the lowest. Among the working class, three-quarters have friends whose mean SEI scores lie in the two lowest categories, with the largest proportion (47 percent) falling in the second-lowest category.

The second panel of table 4.9 approaches the issue in terms of the status homogeneity of people's friends, and these data lend a similar picture to that suggested by the first panel. People from all social classes tend to have friends whose socioeconomic status resembles their own, although the pattern is loose rather than tight. Only about one-fifth to one-quarter of the people in any class have friends whose socioeconomic status is very close to their own (that is, within 10 SEI points), but about three-quarters of the upper-middle class and about 60 percent of each of the other classes have friends whose status lies within an average of 20 SEI points of their own.

The data in both panels of table 4.9 reinforce the picture of class

contact that was suggested by the class data in tables 4.3 and 4.6. People's friendship circles indicate considerable "bunching" of individuals with similar socioeconomic characteristics and a strong tendency for people of widely divergent socioeconomic status to lead separate social lives. However, this is obscured somewhat by the fact that classes lie in a graduated series rather than a dichotomy. The social circles of the upper-middle class and the poor rarely overlap, but in between lie the middle and working classes, whose own localized social tendencies work to segment the social ravine between the more disparate classes. This pattern is exacerbated by the fact that the specific location of the boundaries between classes is less rigidly specified than it is for race or gender, with the effect that social boundaries between the classes tend to fade into each other rather than being sharply marked by a single line.