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Our questionnaire does provide us with rich data and a general look into people's view on friendship; however, having done with the analysis of our questionnaire, we wondered why our respondents favor some options over the others and felt that our result should be explored further. That is the reason why we applied interviews. Interview, as a qualitative research method, is more interactive between the interviewer and the interviewees. Unlike questionnaire which offers limited options, interviews provide open questions. Moreover, the interviewer has the opportunity to probe or ask follow up questions for elaborations and clarifications. Although it is time consuming, which means we could only gather a limited number of data sample, we could ask in-depth questions. From analyzing interview transcripts, we could also see whether there is any underlining meaning behind one answer. Therefore, we believe this is beneficial for our research on friendship.
Questions we asked in the interviews are mainly:
Describing your personality and how you think your personality influences your preferences for friends and forming your friendship?
In this question, what we want to know is about what kinds of friends people with different personalities would prefer and if there is any strength or weakness of certain kinds of personalities when making friends.
Do you like friends with similar hobbies and personalities as you or not? Why?
This is an exploration of our questionnaire. We want to see why people tend to make friends with someone of similar hobbies and personalities or why not.
Imagining your best friend, what first impression he or she gives you?
We ask this descriptive question bacause we think answers to descriptive questions are more objective and thus we can extract more exact information of people's preferences of making friends.
Does the first impression change over time? If yes, do you think this would have an negative impact on your friendship?
In this question, we want to see how people keep a friendship because it is common for people to change.
How do you distinguish friends from acquaintances?
This is another way of asking for definition of friend. We can also learn what activities people often do with friends.
Do you think difference in family and social class positions would influence your friendship with another person?
This is an exploration of our questionnaire. We want to see how differences affect friendship.
Do you think cultural difference would influence your friendship with another person?
Again, this is also an exploration of our questionnaire answers. We want to see detailed explanation on what blocks cross-cultural friendship.
Do you like the company of others? And do you think that social interaction is an essential part of being human?
This question is to ask why people need friendships and identify the social function of friendship.
Do you think that “friends with benefits” works?
This question is asking what people need from a friendship.
How do you view friendship, compared with romance?
With a comparision between friendship and another form of relation, we want to see the uniqueness of friendship.
We conducted 21 interviews on people across nationalities, with different genders and of different ages and have uploaded the interview transcripts and some example recordings above. We have acquired the permission to use individuals' responses and their voice. We appreciate our interviewees’ cooperation to our study and have anonymised such contributions.