Strategic-oriented theory of par excellence friendship and its implications in new generation’s social development

Friendship is both an innate need of human being and a necessity for his/her social life. This need is of greater and more special significance during adolescence. The present research used Grounded Theory, a qualitative research method, in order to advance a theory onfriendship to fill the gap of existing theories in Islamic studies on this topic. Hence, to gather data in the open coding stage, Shia resources were scrutinized. Furthermore, in two other stages: axial coding and selective coding, a strategic management model was adopted for data analysis (conceptualizing data and arranging them as a theory) which is a methodological innovation. To achieve this, each final category derived from the model was considered as one part of a component of the strategic model (i.e. mission, vision, policy etc.). This led to making a logical and systematic relationship between main concepts of the theory and consequently an integrated and total model was resulted which made the large amount of data and teachings more comprehensible. The outcome of this research was named “par excellence friendship theory” based on fundamental principles of friendship and finding friends from an Islamic viewpoint.