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Brain Bigelow, John La Gaipa and William Corsaro have both made important contributions into understanding how children interpret “friendship”. Bigelow and La Gaipa carried out one of the first studies from what was a very under researched area. Bill Corsaro, a key figure in childhood studies, was particularly successful in gaining access into young children's worlds which has helped shape a further picture of this somewhat intriguing definition. Brace and Byford (2012)
One similarity is that they both aimed to study friendships in children and to also provide a persuasive explanation into this. A further similarity was in their methods used for measuring their research, as both initially used a qualitative approach.
Bigelow and La Gaipa set out to investigate children's understanding of friendship by asking children what they expect in a “best friend” and to write this in an essay. This enabled children to write about what they felt was personally meaningful to them. Bigelow and La Gaipa were particularly interested in how children's friendship may alter and finding patterns and changing words into something that can be counted. For example; Using a Quantitative method. So they created a list of different characteristic's that they thought children might expect in a best friend, then after analysing the children's essays they counted the times that characteristic was mentioned within a child's essay.
Therefore turning Qualitative data into Quantitative data, as a result of this it further allowed them to make comparisons between the age groups and to make more efficient comparisons between the thoughts of friendship in girls and boys.
It can be argued that Bigelow and La Gaipa's research may have lost some of the children's individual opinions by creating this list of characteristic's beforehand and then looking for the occurrences in the essays. Brace and Byford (2012) However as Bigelow and La Gapia compiled 480 essay's it would have been too
One similarity is that they both aimed to study friendships in children and to also provide a persuasive explanation into this. A further similarity was in their methods used for measuring their research, as both initially used a qualitative approach.
Bigelow and La Gaipa set out to investigate children's understanding of friendship by asking children what they expect in a “best friend” and to write this in an essay. This enabled children to write about what they felt was personally meaningful to them. Bigelow and La Gaipa were particularly interested in how children's friendship may alter and finding patterns and changing words into something that can be counted. For example; Using a Quantitative method. So they created a list of different characteristic's that they thought children might expect in a best friend, then after analysing the children's essays they counted the times that characteristic was mentioned within a child's essay.
Therefore turning Qualitative data into Quantitative data, as a result of this it further allowed them to make comparisons between the age groups and to make more efficient comparisons between the thoughts of friendship in girls and boys.
It can be argued that Bigelow and La Gaipa's research may have lost some of the children's individual opinions by creating this list of characteristic's beforehand and then looking for the occurrences in the essays. Brace and Byford (2012) However as Bigelow and La Gapia compiled 480 essay's it would have been too
References: Bigelow, B.J La Gapia, J. (1975) 'Children 's written descriptions of friendship: a multidimensional analysis ', Developmental Psychology, Vol. 11, no.6, pp.857-8, in Brace, N and Byford, J (eds), Investigating Psychology, Oxford, Oxford University Press/Milton Keynes, The Open University. Brace, N and Byford,J (eds), Investigating Psychology, Oxford, Oxford University Press/Milton Keynes, The Open University. Interview with William Corsaro (2010), (audio), DSE141, Discovering Psychology, Milton Keynes, The Open University. 3