FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES CONVERSATIONS .2. CODED DIFFERENCES

This is the second of a pair of studies investigating differences betw een friends' and acquaintances' conversations. In Study I (Planalp & B enson, 1992), naive judges were asked to indicate whether they thought conversations were between friends or acquaintances and why. In Study II (reported here), the same conversations were analyzed to determine if the reasons given by judges in Study I did, in fact, discriminate between friends and acquaintances when coded from the conversations an d analyzed statistically. Results indicated that the pattern of differ ences was consistent with Study I, although only a few differences wer e significant statistically due to low power. Discriminant analyses in dicated that two variables alone, mutual knowledge and continuity, pre dicted friends/acquaintances' differences as well as the entire set of variables and with the same level of accuracy (about 80 percent) as t he judges in Study I.