Evaluate the usefulness of Bigelow and La Gaipa’s (1975) work for understanding children’s friendship

Up until the mid-late 1900’s there had been little, if any,

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into children’s relationships with each other in relation to friendships. Bigelow and La Gaipa (1975) saw

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and became the

first

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people to carry out thorough

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into

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particularly complex area. Children’s friendship criteria evolves as they grow, develop and mature and

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is shown in Bigelow and La Gaipa’s (1975) findings. Their

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showed that

initially

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amongst younger children (around 7 years old) their friendships are based on shared experiences and being able to see each other regularly;

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progresses as the children grow towards sharing loyalty and commitment (Brownlow 2014 p244). In their mid-teens

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changes

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change

to having similar attitudes, values and interests (Brownlow 2014 p244).

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essay endeavours to evaluate the usefulness of Bigelow and La Gaipa’s work for understanding children’s friendship. Bigelow and La Gaipa’s (1975) work involved asking children aged between 6 years old and 14 years old to write about their best same-sex friend. Through content analysis they analysed 480 essays, 240

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for

girls and 240

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for

boys. Using 21 predetermined friendship expectation categories they created, they counted the number of times each expectation was mentioned in each individual essay. From

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they were able to see that the frequency of these expectations changed as children matured and their friendships evolved. In essence, they changed qualitative data into quantitative data. Changing the format of

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data does mean the findings can be easily understood and used amongst similar cultures (Western upper-working-class and lower-middle-class),

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, it does lose most of the rich, intricate value that qualitative data provides, as shown in subsequent studies by Damon (1977) and Corsaro (1985). Both Damon (1977) and Corsaro (1985) were prompted by Bigelow and La Gaipa’s (1975) study to look into

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under-researched areas

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however

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they both took different approaches in their

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. One of the drawbacks in the Bigelow and La Gaipa (1975)

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is that the younger participants may have struggled with putting their emotions, feelings and expectations into an essay format.

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was picked up on by Damon (1977) who conducted his

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by interviewing children face-to-face using a set of loosely structures flexible questions. The

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carried out yielded many similarities in the expectations of children’s friendships as Bigelow and La Gaipa’s (1975) did. In 1985 Corsaro developed his study into children’s friendships using ethnography. He became part of the group he was studying so he was directly involved with them and their regular activities and communications. Both of these studies provided data that

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were

exceptionally rich in cultural values, influences and shared experiences and showed that friendships amongst younger children was more complex than previous studies had shown.

Corsaro’s

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Cursors

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indicated that children as young as 3 years old showed concern for their friends feelings (Brownlow 2014 p253)

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Bigelow and La Gaipa’s study did not show

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, possibly as

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was not one of the predetermined characteristics they were studying so it was not included when they transformed their data from qualitative to quantitative.