Alumni distinguished professor Rosemary Blieszner of Virginia Tech and Rebecca Adams, sociologist and gerontologist in the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s School of Health and Human Services.
When they first started studying friendship, other scholars were even more preoccupied with marriage and conventional family than they are now. Blieszner and Adams both realized that friendship was a very significant interpersonal relationship that deserved far more attention than it was getting. They have been publishing their studies of friendship (focusing particularly on the friendships of later life), both separately and together, since the 1980s. They are also friends with each other, fittingly.