Bigelow and La Gaipa worked with a method called content analysis, which transforms qualitative data from essays into quantitative data. Qualitative data includes all information that children provided in their essays. After reading children essays they counted how many times a friendship expectation was mentioned in these essays, which is essentially quantitative data. The advantage of working with content analyses is that it enables identifying specific features and count the frequency of these features occurring in the written essays. Examples of such outcomes include findings like older children having more expectations than young children, boys and girls having almost the same expectations and boys expecting from their best friend that they can play organized. The disadvantage of content analysis is that the individual information is lost when transforming qualitative data into quantitative data. Corsaro for example highlighted the fact that individual personalities cannot be identified in the quantitative data. Therefore, William Corsaro used a different approach than Bigelow and La Gaipa: he didn’t try to fit individual answers into a general model in order to identify patterns but to build an
Bigelow and La Gaipa worked with a method called content analysis, which transforms qualitative data from essays into quantitative data. Qualitative data includes all information that children provided in their essays. After reading children essays they counted how many times a friendship expectation was mentioned in these essays, which is essentially quantitative data. The advantage of working with content analyses is that it enables identifying specific features and count the frequency of these features occurring in the written essays. Examples of such outcomes include findings like older children having more expectations than young children, boys and girls having almost the same expectations and boys expecting from their best friend that they can play organized. The disadvantage of content analysis is that the individual information is lost when transforming qualitative data into quantitative data. Corsaro for example highlighted the fact that individual personalities cannot be identified in the quantitative data. Therefore, William Corsaro used a different approach than Bigelow and La Gaipa: he didn’t try to fit individual answers into a general model in order to identify patterns but to build an