Invoking Social Credentials

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the concept of social credentials, and how these are deployed by the student interviewees in order to account for their experiences of loneliness. It begins by defining what is meant by the term ‘social credential’, before highlighting common patterns across the data set. The first major theme concerns social dispositions, whereby students talk up their possession of particular personality traits in order to present themselves as naturally sociable, thus simultaneously mitigating their prior disclosures of loneliness. In practice this involves explicit and implicit claims to extroversion, a preference for smaller friendship groups, and also a construed intolerance to social isolation. The second major theme concerns a working up of one’s social networks, whereby students vouch for a history of sociability, or the existence of close friendships beyond the university context. Given that loneliness is a peculiarly social experience, the issue of friendships and of one’s attitudes towards them takes on an urgent significance for the students being interviewed.