In this stage, we looked into individual questionnaire answers and wanted to group some answers together to see if there are specific factors influencing people’s perceptions on friends and making friends.
Ethnicity and cultural difference:
The main difference between Asian and white respondents lies in motivation and preferred characteristics for friends. For the questions asking the biggest motivation for making friends and places in which people are more likely to make friends, most Asian respondents choose from the given options, while some white respondents comment on the questions and say they do not have any specific purpose or a designed situations to make friends or they want to make friends for their happiness, which is an quite abstract noun (8 respondent mention this word). From this difference we can derive more than one interpretation: firstly, it could be because that Asians tend to have more specific aims when making friends and are more likely to deliberately make friends in some special occasions than white students. However, this statement does not necessarily be true. It could just be quite common for Asian respondents to choose from existing options instead of adding, which means it does not show difference in making friends between the White and Asian and Asians' actions of agreeing upon the existing elements are determined by their culture. Thirdly, it could also because that Asian people prefer specific examples to some abstract or vague concepts when talking about motivation. If this is true, then again, this is a case with cultural difference.
In terms of preferred personality, apart from the seemingly universal characteristic ”honest” that both Asian and the white prefer, “humorous” seems to be not valued very high by Asian, compared to the white: of the 42 Asian respondents, only 6 choose humorous as one of their desired characteristic for a friend, while 43 out of 52 white respondents choose “humorous” as one of the most important characteristics as a friend. This difference might result from cultural difference. It could because in a conversation between Asian people, the use of humour to make people feel relaxed is not very important, so a friend does not necessarily need this skill. Apart from that, optimistic and cooperative are mentioned by many Asians. The reason why optimistic is more important for Asians than the white is unclear; however, it might because they have a more collectivist culture, and the idea that everyone should work together to strive for the good result influence Asians’ perception on friends.
Personality influence:
From looking at individual report, we found out that personality seems to correlate to friend making pattern and the choice of friend. In general, people who think themselves as more introverted tend to care more about friends’ hobbies, while extraverted people care less. It could be because that a same interest will be a good start of forming a close relationship, especially for people how are shy to talk to new people. Of the 14 respondents who prefer “having lots of friends around at one time” to “having fewer but close friends”, only one also terms himself introverted. It suggests that introverted people seems to favour a smaller but closer relationship with other people. It is also interesting to know, however, that when choosing preferred characteristics of a friend, many introverted people (21 out of 30) choose characteristics that are opposite of their own, such as extraverted and talkative. It seems that introverted people have the desire to talk to outgoing people and join into a bigger social group. On the other hand, none of the extraverted people in our questionnaire prefer people with opposite characteristics. Another interesting point is that while 22 out of 25 extroverted people say whether a friend’s characteristics are the same or not does not really matter in question 10. While in the next question, they tend to choose personalities similar to themselves, such as energetic, optimistic, talkative, and extraverted. This is a question of what people really are and what they think they are, and our goal is to point it out and try to eliminate its negative influence on twisting our data.
Gender influence:
There seems to be no significant difference between male and female in terms of motivations for making friends: people all make friends for personal well-being. However, male are less likely to set fix quality for future friends, compared to women. They are more open to all types of people, including characteristics, hobbies and social class. It is especially for physical appearance: of the 23 people who think physical appearance is important for choosing friends, only three are male. For the question of choosing preferred characteristics for friends, there is not too much difference between male and female respondents: humorous, honesty are the mostly mentioned by both genders. Nevertheless, words like energetic and talkative are more likely to be mentioned by male respondents, while thoughtful and reliable are more mentioned by female respondents. It seems that male and female do have a slightly different preference when making friends.
From looking our data into details, we think differences in personality, gender and ethnic background do have an influence on making friends. We are also aware that since we did not control variables in our questionnaire, one’s answer to a question may be resulting from more than one factor. For instance, cultural and gender factors may both influence one’s preference for friends, but we could not see when looking at individual responses. This is a limitation of our questionnaire. In addition, our questionnaire contains many “yes” or “no” questions, which could simplify our result. We will explore why people value some characteristics in the interviews.