Abstract
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.