Singles or Couples: Who Has More Confidants? More Diverse Confidants?

Recently, on my personal blog, I made fun of a CNN columnist for suggesting that "acting single" means that you don't talk to anyone about what's going on in your life. The article struck me as a variation on the discredited stereotype that single people are alone and don't have anyone.

Now I can add even more myth-busting data to that bit of singles-bashing. In a study that is in press in the journal Information, Communication, & Society, Keith Hampton and his colleagues asked 2,152 Americans to answer this question:

"From time to time, most people discuss important matters with other people. Looking back over the last six months, who are the people with whom you discussed matters that are important to you?"

On the average, the participants named about two people in response to this question about their confidants. Who named more, the singles or the couples? (Couples were people who were married or living with a partner.)

Neither. Singles and couples had the same number of people with whom they had discussed important matters. Each coupled person had someone right there under the same roof as a potential confidant. At least in comparison to singles living on their own, you might think they had a head start on their current list of confidants. But they end up, on the average, with the same number.

There are many potential ways to assess the diversity of a person's set of confidants. One of the approaches the authors used was to look at whether all of the confidants were some sort of family member (parent, sibling, child, spouse, or other relative) or whether other kinds of people (such as friends) were included too.

So who was more likely to have a set of confidants that included people in addition to kin? The singles were.

Here I will add my predictable disclaimer: To understand these findings better, I'd like to see a longitudinal study. As people become coupled, do they ditch or demote their friends and start confiding only to their partner and other family members? Or are the kinds of people who become partnered less likely to confide in friends from the outset? Or is this focus on the family something about the people who are left in the coupled group after all of those who got married and then got unmarried are set aside?

The study was not designed as a test of the link between marital status and confidants. I found the relevant data in the tables that were included in the article. Instead, the authors were pursuing the finding that sent the American media into paroxysms of panic a few summers ago - the claim that 21st century Americans were dramatically less likely to have confidants than they were in the mid-80s. They add some intriguing new findings and insights to that discussion. I'll get to those in a later post.

Reference:
Hampton, K. N., Sessions, L. F., & Ja Her, E. (in press). Core networks, social isolation, and new media: Internet and mobile phone use, network size, and diversity. Information, Communication, & Society.

[Thanks to readers who have been suggesting improvements to my new blog. You should find that it is easier to subscribe now. Also, the site is being "optimized," so it should start showing up more often and more prominently in Google and other searches. Originally, I thought I would cross-post many of my entries about singles (especially the longer ones) both places - here at Living Single as well as on my personal blog. But I've had so many things to share that I haven't kept up with the cross-posting. Check out the "All Things Single" section for other posts (usually brief ones) that have not appeared here at Psychology Today. The other major sections of my new blog are Liars and their Lies, It's Personal, and Off-Topic. Your suggestions have been wonderfully helpful so keep them coming.]