Compares and Contrasts Two Approaches for Studying Friendships Between Children
This essay compares and contrasts two approaches for studying friendships between children: the approach in Bigelow and La Gaipa’s study (1975) and that taken by William Corsaro (1985). The former was one of the first studies of children’s friendships and involved in a first instance qualitative analysis of essays written by 240 boys and 240 girls about the distinguishing features of their best friends and in a second instance a content analysis approach. The latter was based on qualitative analysis of structured interviews and focused in the individual understanding of friendship. This essay will be structured around two perspectives on both approaches: the nature of data produced and challenges in application and interpretation, and underlying theory.
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