Compare and Contrast the Approach to Studying Childrens...

TITLE Compare and contrast the approach to studying children’s friendships taken in the Bigelow and La Gaipa (1974) study with that taken by William Corsaro. Friendship means different things to different people in different cultures. Friendship is also different from other kinds of relationship such as love, family and professional. The influential power on people’s behaviour, style, ideas and life is dominant and remarkable and therefore worthwhile for scientific investigation. This essay will compare and contrast the academic research of three dominant and pioneer scientists on the development psychology discipline and especially in the field of children’s expectations and children’s understanding of†¦show more content†¦In contrast Corsaro emphasised in what friendship means in particular places at particular times and how children communicate each other in real life conditions in their natural environments. Bigelow and La Gaipa used the â€Å"content analysis† for they studies. They took a sample of 480 formal interviews from 8 schools (30 boys and 30 girls from each school, between the ages of si x and fourteen) in written, text format with questions concerning the nature of the friendship between them and their best friend of the same sex, about what they felt were important on these relationships, about what they expected from them and what were the differences between their best friends and other friends and acquaintances. When the written essays were compiled they were all compared against a pre-selected, by the researchers, list of features (relevant to this research study), such as loyalty, genuineness, commitment and admiration, in order to find possible feature similarities (known as a frequency count) between the children’s friendship expectations and the pre-selected list. Finally, Bigelow and La Gaipa made a general list of these frequency counts depending on how many times each of the children’s friendship expectations occurred in their written essays in order to the changing nature of friendship expectations, between the different