When and why we should stop analysing friendship networks

Ample sociological research focusses on, or uses friendships between individuals in their analyses. Although it may seem clear what friendship is when using the term in everyday life, the scientific study of friendship (networks) faces a myriad of challenges due to the conflation of distinct relationship types that vary within and between sociodemographic groups into one only intuitively understood concept ‘friendship’. We review these relations and meanings from respondents’ and re-searchers’ perspective and distil four frequently used friendship archetypes. We discuss how this ‘conceptual overload’ poses challenges for research on social in-tegration, segregation, influence, tie formation, and network ecology. We advocate building on existing friendship and more broadly relational research by theorizing and measuring clearly defined social relations. In doing so, we can build on existing friendship research but advance to conduct more rigorous types of social network analyses.