Friends, Greek affiliation, romantic relationships & the roles they play in social interaction.

Nick Sass

University of Nebraska Lincoln

Abstract

Research on liking people, trust, emotional reliance, and social intimacy spans across many different studies and within theses studies the populations are very different. In this study, we focus on how our results will generalize in regards to college students. The research in generally nonexistent in combining the independent variables we had selected, so we would like to be the first to conduct a study with our selected combination. We selected independent variables such as Greek affiliation, number of close friends, and relationship status because we felt these characteristics played an integral role in understanding our dependent variables of liking people, trust, and social intimacy. We found that there was an interaction between Greek affiliation, relationship status and number of close friends on liking people. We found that Greeks who were not in a relationship only significantly liked people more when they had high number of friends (7+) compared to a low number of friends (0-4). We did not find many significant results when examining our independent variables and their affect on trust, emotional reliance, and social intimacy.

Index Introduction Method Results Discussion Figures Table References