1. Think about one of your current or past friendships. Examine that friendship using Rawlins' five characteristics of friendships: voluntary, personal, equality, involvement, and affect.

2. How has your communication competence or communication apprehension impacted your ability to develop friendships?

3. Think about one of your current or past friendships. Use Rawlins friendship dialectics to analyze this friendship (both contextual and interactional).

4. Think back on a friendship that you no longer have. Take that friendship through all seven of Rawlins' friendship stages (Role Deliminted Interaction, Friendly Relations, Moves-Toward-Friendship, Nascent Friendship, Stabilized Friendship, Waning Friendship, and Post Friendship). How did you decide when the friendship entered into a new stage?

5. Think about your patterns of friendships in your life. Based on the information you learned from Matthews, what type of friendship style do you have?

6. Thinking about the intersection of healthy friendships and enjoyability, think of one friendship from your own life (past or present) that fits into each category. After coming up with four friendships, differentiate among the four friendships and their outcomes.

7. In your view, what is a postmodern friendship, and why is it an important perspective for communication scholars?

8. Think of a time when you've had a cross-group friendship. What made it a cross-group friendship? How was it similar to your same-group friendships?

9. Do you think the word "friend" has been devalued through the use of social media?

10. When you look at Mobinah Ahmad's Six Stage Theory of Friendships, do you agree with her perspective? Why?

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

1 Rawlins Characteristics of Friendships Voluntary The friendship was voluntary as both parties chose to be friends without external pressure Personal It involved a personal connection sharing thought... View the full answer