AND YET...:

Becoming Close: The Geography of Friendship (Allison Aubrey, 8/31/09, NPR: Morning Edition)

In both cases, what drew these friends together in the first place was proximity — being in the same place at the same time. They also shared a common race or heritage.

So, are those two factors really enough to spark a friendship? Bruce Sacerdote, a researcher at Dartmouth College who studies economics and society, says the answer seems to be yes.

"I think having that shared background and the random chance meeting certainly have big impacts on who your friends are," Sacerdote says. He says these early college friendships can even have big impacts on whom you marry, where you live and what you do.

Several sociology studies, some going back decades, point to this proximity or "distance" effect. In Sacerdote's own research, he studied e-mail exchanges among students on his campus. The e-mails were stripped of personal identification and content, as he was only looking to analyze the volume of e-mails.

He then correlated the number of e-mails with factors such as race, hometown, Greek system or fraternity membership, whether students went to private or public high school, and the distance they lived from each other in college housing.

His study found that race and distance were the key determinants.

...university administrators lean heavily towards closing fraternities and moving upper classmen into off-campus apartments, effectively atomizing the population.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 31, 2009 7:46 AM