title: Keeping the ball in the air: contact in long-distance friendships.
abstract: As people continue to be more mobile, maintenance behaviors for long-distance friendships will continue to be a part of the relocation experience. In this qualitative study, 25 women age 45 and over, who had relocated a number of times, were asked to talk about how their friendships had transitioned to being long-distance relationships and what current maintenance behaviors entailed. Communication was a major theme involving electronic mail (e-mail), Christmas cards, telephone calls, and visits. Results from the current study suggest that maintaining the perception of the existence of a well-connected social support system could be accomplished with a single, annual contact. Further, the long-distance friendship biographies explored in this study provided characteristics of friendship maintenance behavior that could be grouped into three main categories forming a proposed typology of long-distance friendship maintenance.
authors.affiliation: Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078, USA. ftanya@okstate.edu
authors.forename: Tanya D
authors.initials: TD
authors.lastname: Finchum
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D034742:Electronic Mail; D005260:Female; D033062:Friends / Q000523:psychology; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008875:Middle Aged; D009769:Object Attachment; D010379:Peer Group; D012929:Psychological Distance; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014481:United States; D016387:Women's Health