Friendly Relationships among Youths

This study will be focused on a very important social relationship that is friendship. Humans are social being and are born to be socialized with others. Isolation and solitude is not its characteristic. Friendship refers to a close and personal relationship, the care with its attributes such as: reciprocity, common choices, trust, openness and loyalty. Circumstances affect the types of friendship at youth age or early adulthood. (Adams and Blieszner, 1996). Friendly relationships in high school are based upon interests is the hypothesis this study will be based on.Subjects that will be part of this study are youths. The study is conducted among students of the State University of Tirana. 50% of selected subjects study at social-oriented departments and the other 50% study at science-oriented departments. The selected methodology is quantitative. The type of systematic randomized sampling is used on this study. The hypothesis this study was based on resulted to be true. The study proved that friendships at faculty are based upon interests. The primary interest where the friendship relationships are based includes interests related directly to school. The main subjects resulted to be the free time spent together and doing the homework together. The females resulted to be more sociable, as the major number of students has mostly female friends within their close friendship circle. Students socialize with individuals that meet their economic state, expectations in school grades and personal characteristics. Reciprocity in friendship relationships while at faculty is very important and males value it more than females.


Introduction 1. Friendly Relationships among youths
This study will be focused on a very important social relationship -friendship.Friendship is an inevitable relationship in one's life.Man is a social being and is born to socialize with others and loneliness and isolation are not his characteristic.Various social activities are often the initiators of friendly relationships.Being together and sharing interests with one another encourages youths to build and strengthen further their friendly relationship (Cherly Maeder, 1999).Circumstances affect forms of friendship in juvenility or in early adulthood (Adams and Blieszner, 1996).Subject of this study will be youths.At this age, approximately at 20 years old, youths start to emotionally detach from their parents and family and move toward a greater individuality (Levinson, 1978).This is a great move, which brings many changes in various social aspects and one of these changes is the making of new friendships.Juvenile individuals are relatively free of social obligations such as marriage and parenting, compared to those of middle age and older.The socialization with friends of both genders is more present that in any other age.

Why youths make friendly relationships
There are several reasons that push youths to get involved into friendly relationships while in faculty.According to Mickulincer and Selinger (2001), there may be a major number of benefits.Fear and social isolation, the need to be heard, encouragement, counseling, sharing in confidence and economical help are some of them.Friendship is a mutual relationship, where the realization of interests that depend on friends takes a very important place and friendship is a voluntary relationship, where personal preferences have a significant place too.According to sociologists, Adams and Graham (1998), besides personal preferences, circumstances, society and culture we belong, play an important role.Some of the key questions to explore friendly relationships at universities are:  Why accompany is important? Who do we quickly make friendship with? Where is the university friendship based on? How much do we invest in a relationship? How mutual are the friendly relationships? Does interest affect the choosing of friendships?

Hypothesis
In order to explore the fore mentioned issues and identify their extension in the friendly relationships among youths at university, one comes to conclusion, upon which this study is based, that: Friendly relationships at university are based on interests.

Operational Definitions
Main concepts used in this study will be defined below in an operational manner.
Interest: Emotional, material and social benefits from a friendly relationship.

Friendly relationships at university: in this study it refers to relationships of an individual with people whom he gets along the most.
Investment in friendly relationships: in this study it refers to emotional investment, time investment and material investment.

Purpose of Study
Purpose of this study is to explore whether the friendly relationships at university are made based on interests and identifying the main ones.

Objectives
Based on the main purpose of the study, objectives aimed to be achieved are: 1. Identification of main reasons for the creation of friendly relationships at university 2. Identification of gender differences in choosing friendship.3. Identification whether studying at science-oriented university branches and social-oriented university branches influences the interests in choosing friendship at university.

Methodology
Methodology used in this study is quantitative.The selection of this method was due to its adaptability with the subject of study.The purpose of study is to explore the interests in friendly relationship among university students.Based on the subjects' extension the quantitative method has been considered as more appropriate.For the realization of the study literature review will be used and collection of data will be conducted via questionnaire.Subject lists of faculties of State University of Tirana are used in this study, for the record of required subjects.Type of questionnaire is assorted.

Sampling
Type of systematic random sampling is used in this study.This sampling procedure aims not only at random preselection of units, but at the fact that this random selection is distributed in the entire list of sample setting, based on sampling fractionating method.From the random selection, number 2 and 21 has been chosen per each group.Should the search in finding these numbers becomes impossible, an approximate number will be used.Sampling number is 100 subjects.50% of subjects study at science-oriented university branches and the other 50% study at social-oriented university branches.Respectively, subjects studying at social-oriented direction, at the Social Sciences Faculty, History-Philology faculty and Foreign Languages Faculty.50% of selected subjects studying at science-oriented direction, respectively studying at Medical Faculty, Economic Faculty and Nature Sciences Faculty.Out of random selection 31 males and 69 females resulted to be part of the study.

3.Nature of friendly relationships
Frequent Interactions give opportunity to people to discover similarities of one-another, as well as feel the empathy of one another (Arkin and Burger, 1980).The general tendency is one chooses his/her friends for what they are.But in reality we socialize with people who like us and support us (Dragoti, 2004).In the interpersonal attraction, the principle of reward takes effect: we like people who support us in the maximum of assessable reward by spending the minimal cost.Not only do we benefit from others concrete material rewards, but also a social one, where the later is even more important.When friends give us social support in our difficult times, when they respect or admire our qualities, this reward becomes so intense that in most cases the attraction between people becomes mutual.Most of interpersonal relationships are consistent with the principle of reciprocity: we tend to like people who like us.The nature of friendship in itself, contains the mutual care, intimacy and the sharing of activities.Reciprocity is an important condition for a friendly relationship to continue ( Friedman, 1993;White, 2001).Friends should share their feelings with one another, rejoice over their friends' achievements, be near them when they are frustrated and dissapointed.Friendship is a relationship not based on blood relations.Frienship has many forms and sizes.It is the place of love and affection, the place where we feel loved, respected, supported and happy.When two people share a strong bind of reciprocity, respect and love, step toward an eternal friendship are taken.Being friends means being there for each other.Annas' viewpoint is that a friend is the one who wishes and desires the best for his/her friend; he desires the friend to exist and live, spends time with the friend and makes the same choicesas friend.

Gender differences in friendly relationships
Males and females in general have different kinds of relationships.Males tend to have friendly relationship between one another, but less intimate.Males search friends based on similar interests, prefer common activities and do not pay too much attention to discussion about feelings (Sherrod, 1989).Females tend to have more intimate, opened and emotional relationships (Ritchie and Mill 1998;Sapadin, 1998).Relationships between females are characterized by many positive attributes that are apparent through the whole life such as: trust, loyalty, joy, care love and compassion.Females discuss continuously with one another and their discussion is profound when it comes to intimate issues regarding themselves or their family.For males intimacy often means discussing or making things together when it comes to work, sport or politics, whereas for females frienship intimacy means sharing feelings and worries.

Role of investment in friendly relationships
Investment is very important for the continuity of a friendly relationship.Friendship aims at being more reciprocal than other forms of attraction, such as respect (Sega,1970).Once the reciprocity starts to shake, the friendship starts to change.In a friendly relationship friends share similar interests, mutual respect and strong relation with one another.It is noticeable that an important component for a friendly relationship is the similar interest.A true friendship is proven to be such based on altruism, sacrificing personal interest for that of friends.When we are awake we spend 20-60% of our time in accompany