Please read the instructions and article carefully. 

2nd Argument paper

Length: aim for 5 paragraphs; References (always include); no title page is needed, but instead a title should be included at the top of the first page.

Topic: Friendships, Sex Differences and Similarities

Please look at the attachment for the article.

Argumentative Essays

What is an argumentative essay?

The argumentative essay is a genre of writing that requires the student to investigate a topic; collect, generate, and evaluate evidence; and establish a position on the topic in a concise manner. Topic should be based on an area of interest of reading to date

The structure of the argumentative essay is held together by the following.

· A clear, concise, and defined thesis statement that occurs in the first paragraph of the essay.

In the first paragraph of an argument essay, students should set the context by reviewing the topic in a general way. Next the author should explain why the topic is important (exigence) or why readers should care about the issue. Lastly, students should present the thesis statement. It is essential that this thesis statement be appropriately narrowed to follow the guidelines set forth in the assignment. If the student does not master this portion of the essay, it will be quite difficult to compose an effective or persuasive essay.

· Clear and logical transitions between the introduction, body, and conclusion.

Transitions are the mortar that holds the foundation of the essay together. Without logical progression of thought, the reader is unable to follow the essay’s argument, and the structure will collapse. Transitions should wrap up the idea from the previous section and introduce the idea that is to follow in the next section.

· Body paragraphs that include evidential support.

Each paragraph should be limited to the discussion of one general idea. This will allow for clarity and direction throughout the essay. In addition, such conciseness creates an ease of readability for one’s audience. It is important to note that each paragraph in the body of the essay must have some logical connection to the thesis statement in the opening paragraph. Some paragraphs will directly support the thesis statement with evidence collected during research. It is also important to explain how and why the evidence supports the thesis (warrant).

However, argumentative essays should also consider and explain differing points of view regarding the topic. Depending on the length of the assignment, students should dedicate one or two paragraphs of an argumentative essay to discussing conflicting opinions on the topic. Rather than explaining how these differing opinions are wrong outright, students should note how opinions that do not align with their thesis might not be well informed or how they might be out of date.

· Evidential support (whether factual, logical, statistical, or anecdotal).

The argumentative essay requires well-researched, accurate, detailed, and current information to support the thesis statement and consider other points of view. Some factual, logical, statistical, or anecdotal evidence should support the thesis. However, students must consider multiple points of view when collecting evidence. As noted in the paragraph above, a successful and well-rounded argumentative essay will also discuss opinions not aligning with the thesis. It is unethical to exclude evidence that may not support the thesis. It is not the student’s job to point out how other positions are wrong outright, but rather to explain how other positions may not be well informed or up to date on the topic.

· A conclusion that does not simply restate the thesis, but readdresses it in light of the evidence provided.

It is at this point of the essay that students may begin to struggle. This is the portion of the essay that will leave the most immediate impression on the mind of the reader. Therefore, it must be effective and logical. Do not introduce any new information into the conclusion; rather, synthesize the information presented in the body of the essay. Restate why the topic is important, review the main points, and review your thesis. You may also want to include a short discussion of more research that should be completed in light of your work.

A complete argument

Perhaps it is helpful to think of an essay in terms of a conversation or debate with a classmate. If I were to discuss the cause of World War II and its current effect on those who lived through the tumultuous time, there would be a beginning, middle, and end to the conversation. In fact, if I were to end the argument in the middle of my second point, questions would arise concerning the current effects on those who lived through the conflict. Therefore, the argumentative essay must be complete, and logically so, leaving no doubt as to its intent or argument.

The five-paragraph essay

A common method for writing an argumentative essay is the five-paragraph approach. This is, however, by no means the only formula for writing such essays. If it sounds straightforward, that is because it is; in fact, the method consists of (a) an introductory paragraph (b) three evidentiary body paragraphs that may include discussion of opposing views and (c) a conclusion.

Encyclopedia of Human Relationships

Friendships, Sex Differences and Similarities

Contributors: Barbara A. Winstead

Edited by: Harry T. Reis & Susan Sprecher

Book Title: Encyclopedia of Human Relationships

Chapter Title: “Friendships, Sex Differences and Similarities” Pub. Date: 2009

Access Date: February 15, 2020

Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc. City: Thousand Oaks

Print ISBN: 9781412958462

Online ISBN: 9781412958479

DOI:

http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412958479.n229

Print pages: 714-716

© 2009 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

Attempting to capture the essential differences between women’s and men’s same-sex friendships, Paul Wright described them respectively as “face-to-face” and “side-by-side.” Although the observation that women, compared with men, describe their same-sex friendships as more intimate, emotionally expressive, and supportive has been repeatedly verified, exploration of what this means and why it occurs continues. Too much attention to gender differences can also obscure important similarities between women’s and men’s friendships. This entry focuses on same-sex friendships, but cross-sex friendships will also be discussed.

Friendships are nonkin, nonromantic, voluntary, and reciprocal personal relationships. Reciprocal relation- ships and frequent use of the word “friend” emerge by the time a child is 4 years old. Friendships are often cross-sex in preschool, become increasingly same-sex (as much as 95 percent) during middle childhood, and then less exclusively gender concordant in adolescence and adulthood. Friends are expected to be equals, to confide in one another, to do things together, to be comfortable being one’s self with one another, and to be supportive, trustworthy and accepting. Not having friends has been linked to depression, lower feelings of self-worth, and less social competence throughout the life span.

Gender Differences

Children, adolescents, and adults have been asked in many ways what they do with their friends, how they perceive their friends and their friendships, what they give to and receive from their friends and how they feel about their friends and their friendships. A sampling of results from these studies of friendship shows that in childhood girls, compared with boys, have fewer friends but more exclusive, intimate, and expressive relationships with their same-sex friends; girls rate their best friends higher for companionship, help, secu- rity, and closeness; both pre-adolescent girls and college women report greater communion with their best friend (i.e., support, nurturance, intimacy, validation, love, loyalty, and companionship); women rate their best friends higher than men rate their best friends on supportiveness, security, concern, and desire to spend free time together; in describing providing help to a same-sex friend, women report spending more time helping; women engage in more intimate self-disclosure to a samesex friend; women report talking to their same-sex friends more about relationships, personal problems, and secrets; women express more affection, verbally and nonverbally, toward their same-sex friends; and women use more supportiveness, openness, and inter- action in maintaining their same-sex friendships.

Conversely, boys are somewhat more likely than girls are to describe their same-sex best friend as someone who fulfills instrumental needs, such as competition, status, guidance, favors, and praise for accomplish- ments; young men are more likely than are women to describe their same-sex closest friend as someone with whom they compete, quarrel, and tease; and men talk more with same-sex friends about sports, hobbies, work, and shared activities. Although some researchers have found that women are more satisfied with their same-sex friends, others have found no sex differences in satisfaction. Even in a sample where women re- ported more personal self-disclosure and involvement in their interactions with same-sex friends, women and men gave similar ratings for meaning-fulness, pleasantness, and satisfaction.

Although sex differences in same-sex friendships are reliably found, they tend to be small to moderate in size, meaning that being male or female accounts for a relatively modest portion of the overall variance in same- sex friendships. A further caveat is that most data on friendships are collected from self-reports, where par- ticipants are asked to describe their relationships with friends, rather than through direct observation, making it probable that what men and women think their friendships should be like, as well as what their friendships really are like, influence participants’ responses.

Gender Similarities

Despite these many differences, women and men generally share similar views of same-sex friendships, valu-

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Encyclopedia of Human Relationships

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ing intimacy, trust, emotional closeness, and self-disclosure. Also, when researchers focus on within-gender differences rather than between-gender differences, similarities emerge. Although women may give higher ratings than do men on some measures, the rankings for what women and men value in friendships tend to be similar. For example, when describing ideal and real same-sex best friends, women and men rate commu- nal characteristics, such as support, intimacy, and loyalty, higher than instrumental ones, such as competition, status, and network access. Both women and men agree that self-disclosing interactions create more inti- macy in friendships than activity-based interaction does. Both women and men recognize connection as the most important goal in same-sex friendship and trust as the most valued quality of a friend. These friendship characteristics have also been found to predict friendship quality for both women and men. Finally, data from diary techniques indicate that friends spend most of their time together talking and that women and men do not differ in this regard.

Understanding Differences

If women and men value similar friendship qualities, then why are women’s same-sex friendships consistently rated as higher in intimacy and closeness? Beverley Fehr asked women and men to generate descriptions of behaviors that contribute to intimacy in friendships. Frequent responses involved self-disclosure and emotion- al support, and these were generated equally by women and men. On the other hand, women were more like- ly than men to regard these behaviors as central to friendship intimacy. Violations of these intimacy patterns were perceived by women as more damaging to friendship intimacy and by both men and women as more damaging if they occurred in a female same-sex friendship compared with a male same-sex friendship. Thus, women have both a stronger belief in the importance of self-disclosure and emotional support to intimacy in friendships and, as many studies have shown, are more likely to engage in these behaviors. Researchers studying these patterns have generally concluded that men simply prefer not to engage in these behaviors that lead to closer and more intimate friendships.

If men and women agree on the path to friendship intimacy but women choose to travel further down this path than men, are there barriers to intimacy in men’s same-sex friendships? Barbara Bank and Suzanne Hansford found that emotional restraint and wanting to maintain distance from gay men were most helpful in explaining gender differences in intimacy and support in a same-sex best friendship. Having no role model (a same-sex parent with close friends) reduced the effect of gender on supportiveness, and masculine self-identity reduced the effect of gender on intimacy. The authors concluded that men’s tendency to be emotionally cautious and reserved with their male friends may account to some extent for their failure to establish more intimate and supportive same-sex friendships. Although these barriers to male friendship contributed to explaining sex dif- ferences in friendship intimacy and supportiveness, these barriers did not eliminate the differences, suggest- ing that although characteristics of the male role do help us understand these gender differences, they do not fully account for them.

Although men have been described as not preferring behaviors that promote closeness and intimacy, it may be that they choose these behaviors without necessarily preferring them. Evidence indicates that men would like more openness in their same-sex interactions and that given the proper context, they are willing to ex- press affection toward same-sex friends. Men may also suffer more from these choices; failure to meet com- munal needs in friendships was found to predict loneliness for men but not for women.

Recent research has included a focus on the instrumental aspects of same-sex relationships in addition to the more frequently studied communal aspects. Results for sex differences are mixed. Lynne Zarbatany and her colleagues found that boys and men prefer friends who provide competition, encouragement, and status and who are influenced by their actions and opinions, but Bank and Hansford, measuring status orientation toward friendship, found that women were more likely than men to want friends who respect and depend on them and who are influenced by them. These noncommunal characteristics of friendship also appear to contribute positively to friendship quality. Researchers might also pay more attention to the ways in which friendship

interactions provide fun, relaxation, and relief from boredom. Integrating both instrumental and communal as- pects of relationships may be critical for establishing effective friendships. That Joyce Benenson and Athena Cristakos found that adolescent females have same-sex best friendships of shorter duration and more former best friends, suggesting in their words “greater fragility,” indicates that there is more to know about friendships than just how close and intimate they are. Rather than focusing on men’s problems with friendships, the field might better address the multifac-eted benefits of friendships, the strategies that women and men use to ac- crue these benefits, and the barriers they each experience in meeting their friendship goals.

Cross-Sex Friendships

Less research has addressed the experience of cross-sex friendships. Cross-sex friendships are common in preschool children, become rare in middle childhood and reemerge in adolescence and young adulthood, becoming less frequent again as adults enter marriage and parenthood. Romantic partners and spouses are often viewed as close, or even best, friends. For research purposes, however, cross-sex (and same-sex) friendships are defined as nonromantic relationships. There is less research on cross-sex friendships, and results may be affected by the age of the sample and the nature of the measures. In general, results suggest that females receive fewer benefits from cross-sex friends than males. Men rate their cross-sex friendships higher on enjoyment, nurturance, and overall quality than women rate their cross-sex friendships. Men have also been found to rate their cross-sex (female) friends as more accepting, intimate, and emotionally support- ive than are their same-sex friends.

Gays, Lesbians, and Friendships

Same-sex and cross-sex friendships are generally assumed to occur between individuals with a heterosexual orientation. But sometimes this is not the case. In studies of teenagers and young adults with homosexual orientations, Lisa Diamond and Eric Dube found that lesbians had particularly strong connections to other fe- males, as friends, best friends, and attachment figures; whereas gay men were the least likely, compared with lesbians and heterosexual youth, to have same-gender best friends and more likely than others to form cross- gender friendships. Conversely, Peter Nardi and Drury Sherrod, with an older sample, found no differences between lesbians and gay men in their ratings of same-sex friends on satisfaction, social support, self-disclo- sure, or activities. Nardi and Sherrod did find, however, that many lesbians and gay men reported having had sexual relationships with their friends.

Structural Factors in Friendships

Friendships, being voluntary and nonobligatory, are often studied as if they were context-free. One context that has received some attention is culture. Although most studies of friendship, including those previously mentioned, are based largely on North American samples, researchers have studied the influence of collec- tivistic and individualistic cultures on perceptions of samesex friends in childhood and adulthood. Although there were differences based on culture, these were not affected by gender; in other words, culture influenced both sexes equally. Virgil Sheets and Robyn Lugar, comparing friendship in Russia and in the United States, found stable gender differences across countries, but Russian men were particularly unlikely to have cross- sex friends. Culturally defined gender roles may have a particularly strong effect on cross-sex friends.

Other contextual factors may also affect gender and friendships. In the workplace, for example, gender sim- ilarities were found on measures of quality of same-sex friendships. Social settings—such as school, work, neighborhoods, churches, interest groups, and sport teams—also provide opportunities for friendships. They may play differential roles in the formation and maintenance of friendship. Might one be more likely to share

activities with a friend made at work or through team sports but self-disclose and provide support with a friend from the neighborhood or an interest group? The structural factors that influence friendships and perhaps help account for the gender differences described here are just beginning to be defined and explored.

· friends

hip

· cross-sex friendships

· sex

· intimacy

· cross rate

· self-disclosure

· friends

Barbara A. Winstead
http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412958479.n229

See also

·

Daily Diary Methods

·

Friendships, Cross-Sex

·

Friendships in Adolescence

·

Friendships in Young Adulthood

·

Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Relationships

·

Sex Differences in Relationships

·

Workplace Relationships

Further Readings

Bank, B. J., and Hansford, S. L.Gender and friendship: Why are men’s best same-sex friendships less intimate and supportive?Personal relationships7(2000). 63–78.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/

j.1475-6811.2000.tb00004.x

Benenson, J. F., and Christakos, A.The greater fragility of females’ versus males’ closest same-sex friend- ships. Child Development74(4)(2003). 1123–1129.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00596

Fehr, B.(1996).Friendship processes. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Fehr, B.Intimacy expectations in same-sex friendships: A prototype interaction-pattern model. Journal of Per- sonality and Social Psychology86(2004). 265–284.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.86.2.265

Winstead, B. A., Derlega, V. J., & Rose, S.(1997).Gender and close relationships. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Winstead, B. A., & Griffin, J. L.(2001).Friendship styles. In J.Worell (Ed.), Encyclopedia of women and gender (Vol. 1, pp. 481–492). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Wright, P. H.(2006).Toward an expanded orientation to the comparative study of women’s and men’s samesex friendships. In K.Dindia, & D. J.Canary (Eds.), Sex differences and similarities in communication (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Zarbatany, L., Conley, R., and Pepper, S.Personality and gender differences in friendship needs and expe- riences in preadolescence and young adulthood. International Journal of Behavioral Development28(2004). 299–310.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01650250344000514