Some observations suggest that friendships are developed and maintained because they involve some form of reinforcement or interpersonal reward. Other observations suggest that friendship has an intrinsic, end-in-itself quality making it unnecessary, if not contradictory, to assume that friendships must be rewarding to be formed and sustained. The present paper outlines a model of friendship based on a conception of self and self-referent motivation. The model represents, in part, an effort to reconcile the observed rewardingness of friendship with its intrinsic, end-in-itself character.

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Research on gender and friendship has yielded a modal pattern of differences between women and men that is impressively robust. However, these differences are reported in ways that are sometimes misleading and often exaggerated, and that generally leave the impression of greater within-gender uniformity than is actually the case. In sum, the importance of gender differences in friendship is overemphasized. The present paper addresses some possible meanings of `importance' as applied to social research. It is intended to be a reminder of some widely acknowledged but easily overlooked points of interpretation concerning the kinds of data with which relationship researchers usually deal. Specific issues are the tendency to reify statistical significance, to overlook within-group variability, and to disregard the implications of gender as a subject variable. Moderation in interpreting and reporting differences and healthy skepticism are offered as simple hedges against exaggerating the importance of gender differences in friendship.

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