Friendships in university residences can be formed through mere exposure to and passive contacts with other students. These friendships are maintained through proximity, familiarity and similarity and these factors will influence whether a friendship is long-lasting. 149 undergraduate students were asked to fill in questionnaires regarding their three closest friends at university and how they met these friends. 41% of friends met through living together in their first year of study. However, a significant association was found between year of study and how students met their friends, 2(14) = 31.09; p &le; 0.05. Third year students were more likely to have met their friends through societies and sports clubs than first year students and were less likely to have met them through living together in their first year. Friendships are more long-lasting when similar interests are a factor. 
Introduction
The need to affiliate with others is a central part of human nature. This basic need is fulfilled by the formation of friendships and close relationships with people in the surrounding environment. When students arrive at university for the first time they are often unacquainted with the people around them therefore they make the effort to form new friendships and social groups. There are several factors that influence which people they will choose to form friendships with. One major influencing factor is that of physical proximity (Festinger, Schachter & Back, 1950). When someone is living close by, you are likely to see them more often and become more familiar with them. Familiarity has been shown to directly influence how much a person is liked by another (Moreland & Beach, 1992). Another influencing factor is how similar a person is to another (Newcomb, 1961). The more similar people are, and the more familiar they are with each other, the more likely they are to become friends. One of the first influential studies of friendship formation in university residences was carried out by Festinger, Schachter and Back (1950). Their study was conducted in two housing communities providing accommodation for students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All the students were married and the residences consisted of apartments for students and their wives. There were also apartments for couples with children giving a total number of 270 apartments overall. Festingeral. (1950) hypothesised that most friendships within these housing communities would develop through "passive contacts" (pp.34). The residents were unlikely to have previous contacts in the area so would develop friendships through repeated brief meetings with others when travelling in and out of buildings and around the neighbourhood. When travelling around the area, residents would follow specific pathways depending on their destination. Following these pathways regularly would result in repeated exposure to particular people. Westgate West, one of the two housing communities, consisted of apartment blocks, each block containing ten apartments. The physical distance between each apartment within each block was calculated. This included stairways between the two floors. Residents were more likely to become friends with people living in apartments that were the shortest physical distance away from their own because they passed these apartments more often. However, friendships may not develop between the occupants of neighbouring apartments if these apartments are not situated on pathways regularly travelled. For example, if residents live on the first floor they may not pass apartments on the end of that floor, but will pass certain apartments on the ground floor because they are near the staircase. A separate measure of functional distance was developed to take this into account. The effects of functional distance were also observed in Westgate, the other housing community. This community consisted of houses around a court. Houses on the ends of rows faced out of the court and on to the main road. Residents were less likely to report friendships with people living in these particular houses because they did not pass the front of these houses frequently and consequently had less brief meetings with the occupants. Proximity was clearly an influential factor in friendship formation in Festinger et al.'s, (1950) study, but there are other factors that may contribute to whether passive contacts will become more meaningful friendships. The investigators noted the similarity of the students and their wives. They were all within the same age range and came from similar backgrounds. All the students attended a technical college so they had a shared interest in scientific and industrial fields. The similarities highlighted here, may have contributed to the large number of friendships formed between residents. Balance theory (Heider, 1958) provides an explanation of how and why different factors interact and contribute to friendship formation. In order for a person to have a positive attitude towards, or friendship with another person, several factors have to be in balance. The proximity of where they live may be an initial factor that leads to frequent meetings and hence a second factor; familiarity. Once these two factors are in place, the two people will find out more about each other and may discover that they have similar interests. This provides the third factor of similarity. However, these three factors may not be in balance and when they are not in balance it may be difficult for a friendship to form. For example, two people may be in close proximity to each other but their paths may not cross frequently so the factor of familiarity will not develop. Also, if they do become familiar with each other but discover they have very different attitudes and interests there is an absence of similarity and their friendship may not continue further. However, factors can be changed to correct the imbalance. If two people have different attitudes then one may change their attitudes to match the other and their relationship is balanced once more. A study was carried out by Priest and Sawyer (1967) to investigate the effects of balance theory on friendships in university residential halls. The students were asked to complete questionnaires, naming their five best friends and then categorising a list of everyone who lived in the hall according to how well they knew each person. This task was completed to clarify reciprocation of choice and identify pairs of friends. The students completed the questionnaire in the Autumn term and again in the Spring term. The investigators were interested in the effects of proximity and peership on liking and recognition and whether this changes over time. Proximity was measured in a similar way to Festinger et al.'s (1950) study and peership was concerned with whether the friends were in the same year of study, particularly whether they were in the first year or not. Priest and Sawyer (1967) found that both proximity and peership were positively correlated with liking and recognition, as balance theory would predict. The dynamics of balance theory were investigated by comparing results of pairs of students across the two terms. It was found that for closer proximity pairs the attraction between them changes less when it is initially high. For students living further apart the attraction changes less when initially low. The same balance idea was found for peership. Higher attraction was more stable between peers and lower attraction was more stable between non-peers. The current study was concerned with the effects of proximity on long-term friendships in a modern university setting. Both Festinger et al.'s (1950) and Priest and Sawyer's(1967) studies were carried out several decades ago and there may be more influencing factors to take into account. One factor is that the University of  is a campus university so accommodation is not as isolated and students have more opportunities to interact with others they are not living near to. Today, there appears to be a greater social side to university life with a large variety of societies and sports clubs to belong to. Festingeral. (1950) mentioned the existence of extra-curricular clubs but there was no mention of extensive involvement in them. A factor that had not been investigated, but was addressed in this study, was whether friendships initially made through accommodation in the first year are still prominent in later years when students no longer live in university accommodation. It was noted that the amount of contact time on courses varies considerably between faculties at the University of  and in the current study an investigation was carried out into whether students with more contact time are more likely to have friends on their course than friends in their accommodation because they will be more familiar with them. Finally, the current study observed whether the number of shared facilities in student halls would effect friendship formation as investigated by Yinon, Goldenberg and Neeman (1977). In Festinger et al.'s (1950) study, the students lived in separate apartments so did not share bathroom and kitchen facilities, which would provide more opportunities to interact with other students. MethodParticipantsAn opportunity sampling method was employed to select participants. The participants consisted of 149 undergraduate students at the University of . The experimenters visited three main areas on the University of  campus to obtain the majority of participants. These areas were chosen because they were areas commonly used by students belonging to all year groups and faculties. The areas were non-academic and most students were approached while relaxing and conversing with friends. When approached by an experimenter, the students were asked if they were undergraduates and once this was confirmed they were asked to complete a short questionnaire about friendship for a second year psychology project. Care was taken to gather a representative sample of the university undergraduate population. Information was obtained from university administration services containing statistics for the number of males and females in each year group in each subject faculty. Percentages for each subcategory were calculated from these statistics and applied to the final sample of 146 participants, after three participants were eliminated from the initial 149 because their questionnaires were missing vital information. The number of male, second year, science students that participated was substantially more than the number required and the number of male, first year, social studies students was substantially less than the number required. In order to balance these numbers, six male, second year, science students' questionnaires were removed from the sample and replaced with six additional questionnaires completed by male, first year, social studies students. These social studies students' answers were obtained by approaching male students in the social studies building and enquiring which year group they belonged to. ProcedureBefore the main study took place, a draft questionnaire was drawn up and used in a pilot study carried out on ten undergraduate students. Feedback from the pilot study included advice about how to adapt the questions to make it clearer to participants what the questions were asking. Suggestions were also made for additional options to be included for particular questions. The questionnaire began by asking the participant for some general information. This included their gender, their year of study and which course they were taking. The information about their course allowed the experimenters to categorise them into the appropriate subject faculty. Next, the participant was asked which hall of residence they stayed in during their first year of study. This allowed categorisation into type of accommodation according to facilities shared. They were then asked to think of their three best friends at university and answer a set of questions about each friend in turn. For each friend the participant was asked to answer the following set of questions. The first question asked them to choose one or more of five categories which best described how they met their friend. These categories were; "on your course", "met through societies and sports clubs", "friend of a friend", "lived together in 1 st year", and "other". The second question was only answered if the participant lived with their friend in their first year of study. This question was designed to obtain information about proximity. It initially asks if the participant shared a kitchen with the friend. This was appropriate because the majority of campus accommodation at the university is self-catering and groups of rooms near each other are assigned to the same kitchen. Therefore, sharing a kitchen with someone would imply that you lived nearer them than if you did not share a kitchen. If a participant did share a kitchen with their friend then more detailed information about where their room was located in relation to their friend's was gathered. To gather this information, the participant was asked to choose between eight categories; "shared a room", "next door", "directly opposite", "2 doors away", "3 doors away", "4 doors away", "5 doors away", and "other option not specified above". If the participant did not share a kitchen with their friend, they were asked to specify where their friend lived. Examples of possible answers were given. These were, "next kitchen along" and "same block". The complete questionnaire can be found in appendix 1. Results The data from the questionnaires had to be organised into a logical format before data analysis could begin. Firstly the participants' answers were placed into categories representing the three subject faculties; science, social studies and arts. For example, if someone put "Chemistry" as their course, this would be recorded as science and if someone put "English Literature" as their course, this would be recorded as arts. The data concerning which residences the students stayed in during their first year was grouped. A question about residences was asked because the number of students that shared a particular facility may have influenced friendship formation. The twelve different halls were placed into three categories. The first category contained halls with en-suite bathrooms, the second contained halls with shared bathrooms and fifteen or less people to a kitchen, and the third category contained halls with shared bathrooms and sixteen or more people to a kitchen. The main question of interest was that concerning how the students met each of their friends. Although they were given five options to choose from, they were allowed to tick more than one and the "other" option asked them to specify. More than five categories were therefore required to collate the results. Eight categories were chosen in all. These categories are shown in Table 1 along with reasons for choosing them. For the question concerning proximity for students who shared a kitchen with their friend, seven categories were used although eight options were on the questionnaire. This was because the two options "next door" and "directly opposite" were considered as identical distances and were combined into one category. For the question concerning proximity for students who did not share a kitchen with their friend, three categories were used. The majority of students wrote something similar to "next kitchen" or "same block" so these were used as categories along with "other" for anyone not placed in "next kitchen" or "same block". This study found that friends chosen by participants were more likely to have met the participant by living with them in the first year of study than by any other means. Figure 1 shows that 177 friends out of 434 were placed in the "lived together in 1 st year" category. The second most popular category was "on your course" with 109 friends, followed by "met through societies or sports clubs" with 55 friends. A chi-square goodness-of-fit test was carried out on the eight categories, 2(7) = 459.4; p < 0.05. This showed a significant difference between the number of friends in each category. "On your course" was the second most popular category and it was hypothesised that the type of course or faculty that the participant belonged to would affect how many friends they chose in this category. A chi-square test for association found no significant association between the three faculties (science, arts, and social studies) and how participants met their friends. The faculty that the students belonged to had no affect on how many friends they placed in the "on your course" category. With "lived together in 1 st year" clearly being the most popular category it was important to investigate whether friendships formed in this way were likely to last throughout the students' time at university. This was achieved by comparing answers of 1 st year students with those of 2 nd year and 3rd year students. Only a small number of fourth year students were included in the study due to only a small number of them in the university population. For this reason, fourth year students were eliminated from this particular analysis. A chi-square test for association was carried out and a significant association was found between the year of study of the students and their choice of category for how they met their friends; 2(14) = 31.09; p &le; 0.05. Figure 2 shows how the three most popular categories for meeting current friends vary between years of study. From figure 2, it can be seen that the percentage of friends placed in the "lived together in 1 st year" category drops considerably from 44% for 2 nd year students to 27% for 3 rd year students. There is also a steady increase for the category "met through societies or sports clubs" from 5% for 1 st year students to 23% for 3 rd year students. The category "on your course" remains fairly stable throughout the year groups. To test Festinger, Schachter and Back's (1950) theory of proximity and functional or physical distance, two chi-square analyses were carried out. The aim of the first was to discover a significant difference between the categories "shared a kitchen", "same block", "next kitchen", and "other". These categories consisted of all the friends that were placed in the "lived together in 1 st year" category. An overwhelming majority of 164 friends were placed in the "shared a kitchen" category. The other categories contained 18, 15, and 12 friends for "same block", "next kitchen", and "other" respectively. The result for the chi-square goodness-of-fit test was 2(3) = 319; p &le; 0.05. The second chi-square was concerned with all the friends that were placed in the "shared a kitchen" category. The categories for this chi-square were "next door/opposite", "2 doors away", "3 doors away", and "4 doors away". The chi-square test was not significant although the number of friends decreased with increasing number of doors. The final point of interest was whether the type of accommodation that students lived in during their 1 st year affected how friendships were formed. A chi-square test for association was carried out and a significant association was found between the type of accommodation the students lived in during their first year and their choice of category for how they met their friends; 2(14) = 37.29; p &le; 0.05. Figure 3 shows the percentages for the three most popular categories for each accommodation category. The highest percentage for the "lived together in 1 st year" category was for accommodation with a shared bathroom and 16 or more to a kitchen and was 56%. The lowest percentage for this category was for accommodation with a shared bathroom and 15 or less to a kitchen and was 33%. However, this accommodation type had the highest percentage for the "met through societies or sports clubs" category, at 26%. DiscussionThis study shows that most of the closest friendships formed at university are with people that students live with in their first year of study. Although the University of  is a campus university providing a great deal of opportunity for students to mix with others they are not living with, such as through societies and sports clubs, students form more friendships with others who are physically close to them. They form friendships with the people whom they have the most passive contacts with as Festinger, Schachter and Back (1950) suggested. A lot of friendships were also formed between students on the same course and students that were members of the same society, as can be seen in figure 1. This is expected because friends in these situations will be very similar in regards to hobbies and interests. As Newcomb (1961) points out, similarity influences friendship. A substantial amount of friends were placed in the "lived together in 1 st year combination" category which meant that there were other factors, such as being on the same course or being involved in the same societies, influencing the friendship as well as proximity. This is consistent with Heider's (1958) balance theory in that both similarity and familiarity, resulting from proximity, were contributing to the stability of the friendships. No relationship was found between the faculty students belonged to and how they met their friends. It was expected that there would be more passive contacts between students when they had more contact hours on their course and this would subsequently increase familiarity and therefore the chances of a friendship developing. The negative results may have occurred because the difference between contact times for each faculty was negligible compared to the amount of time given for passive contacts to occur while students are in their residences. A finding of particular interest was the affect of the year of study of students on what friends they chose for the questionnaire and how they met these friends. Figure 2 shows a graph depicting the decrease in the number of friends met through living together in the 1 st year with year of study. This suggests that there may be an imbalance in friendships made in the 1 st year, in that 1 st year students make friends with the people they live with because they have to live with them, not necessarily because they share similar interests. Once these students move out of university accommodation they may not maintain these friendships because proximity is no longer an influencing factor. This provides evidence for friendships formed through passive contacts not necessarily being long-lasting and questions whether this type of friendship is genuine. For "lived together in 1 st year" there is only a minor decrease between 1 st and 2 nd year of study with a major decrease between 2 nd and 3 rd year of study. A reason for this may be that students at this particular university have to choose their second year accommodation very early on, and may choose to live with people they are currently living with because they are unfamiliar with other students. The same sort of imbalanced friendship may then occur in the second year as well as the first. Figure 2 shows an increase in "met through societies or sports clubs" with year of study. This implies that friendships made through living together in the 1 st year are replaced by friendships made within societies. Members of a society will share a common interest that will positively contribute to the friendship. Students in their third year of study will also have had more opportunities to become familiar with other society members than students in their first year of study. Hence, balance theory can be applied more to third year students in this situation than first year students. Sharing a kitchen appears to be an important factor in the formation of friendships. The "shared a kitchen" category was far more popular than any other form of living together and not sharing a kitchen. This is because students have many more opportunities to interact while preparing food and the kitchen also becomes an important communal area for general socialising with others. The chi-square test carried out on distance between rooms, measured by number of doors, was not significant. This can be explained by the fact that students living one to four doors away from each other will share the same kitchen and have much more opportunity to interact within the kitchen than through passing by each others rooms. Festinger, Schachter and Back (1950) found that the number of doors was significant because friendships were made entirely through passive contacts because and not through the sharing of communal facilities. The importance of shared kitchens is reiterated in figure 3. There is a steep increase in percentage of friends in the "lived together in 1 st year" category from the category "less than 15 people to a kitchen" to the category "more than 16 people to a kitchen". The number of friends made by living together in the first year depends on the number of people to a kitchen. The sharing of a bathroom is not relevant, and this is shown by the higher percentage of friends for the "en-suite" category than the "shared bathroom, 15 or less to a kitchen" category. The number to a kitchen varies for the en-suite category. The "met on course" line in figure 3 shows that this variable is not affected by type of accommodation. However, the "met through societies/clubs" line suggests that when friends are not made through living together in the first year because of accommodation type, they are more likely to be made through societies and sports clubs. A study by Yinon, Goldenberg and Neeman (1977) also discovered the importance of shared kitchens in student accommodation. The accommodation in their study was classed into four categories: low, moderate, high, and very high interaction. They found that the higher the interaction, the more the students were likely to become friends. Only in the high and very high interaction categories were there communal kitchens. No significant data was found for the type of course a particular student was studying affecting how they met their friends. This may have been because courses were split into three faculties and this categorisation was too broad. Courses within the same faculty may be very different. Further research is needed to investigate exactly how much opportunity students have to interact with peers on their course or whether certain subjects organise social events outside structured hours. It may also be of interest to investigate friendships formed through living together in the second and third years of students' courses and to discover what factors influence the choice of who to live with after the first year. The university's system for finding housing will be different at other universities because some may require first year students to organise their own housing or give less help and advice about housing in general. The findings of this study may not be suitable for generalisation to other universities but this does provide another area for further research. Despite being specific to one university, the results of this study clearly show that proximity is important for friendship in an unfamiliar environment but friendships formed through proximity alone are not necessarily long-lasting. 