Never walk alone on the way: Friendships of emerging adults

This study aimed to comprehend how individuals in emerging adulthood characterize friendship. This study adopted a qualitative design to obtain in‐depth information about the elements in emerging adults' definitions of friendships. The study was conducted with university samples and non‐university samples. As a result of the study, the elements in the friendship definitions of the participants were grouped under five themes: behavioral processes; cognitive processes; emotional processes, structural characteristics, and distinctive features. Accordingly, sharing, fun, assistance, boundaries, and altruism sub‐codes were categorized under behavioral processes; while trust, compatibility, commitment‐fidelity, and respect sub‐codes were categorized under cognitive processes. Intimacy, requirement sub‐codes were categorized under affective processes and openness, homogeneity, heterogeneity, and reciprocity sub‐codes were grouped under structural characteristics themes. Apropos of distinctive features they included the sub‐codes of developmental support, unconditional acceptance, isolation‐vigilant, closeness, friend as a life partner, and network. In addition to the codes in the university sample, “Effects of marriage” was the only code that differed in the non‐university sample.