Friendship Formation in an Enforced Online Regime: Findings from a U.S. University Under COVID

Friendships are a key element of mental health, yet modern life increasingly involves "enforced online regimes," which can inhibit friendship formation. One example is provided by residential university students under COVID-19. Through interviews with 17 graduate students at a U.S. university, we investigate how new friendships were made and maintained under the pandemic. While some of our individual findings echo previous work with online social interaction, our analysis reveals a novel 7-phase friendship formation process that extends Levinger & Snoek's classic pair-relatedness theory. The model enables pinpoint diagnoses. For our participants, three specific phases were blocked -- Physical Awareness (apprehension of another's physical characteristics); Personal Contact (exchange of personal information); and Ongoing Mutuality (repeat interactions to build friendship). The model also explains divergent results under similar but different situations (e.g., residential students under COVID eventually made friends, but students of purely online courses do not), and enables targeted recommendations.