Adults' and children's friendships across social class and ethnic differences.
Description: Public and political concern about the quality of everyday life in socially and ethnically mixed inner urban localities has intensified since the urban disturbances of summer 2011. This research will examine the somewhat neglected issue of the intimate micro social processes of friendship and how these relationships help to shape everyday life in diverse inner urban localities for adults and children. Thus we will examine adults' and children's friendships in 'super-diverse' (Vertovec, 2007) urban localities and explore what those friendships reveal about the nature and extent of ethnic diversity and social divisions in contemporary multicultural society. We will explore the extent to which adults and children become friends with those who are differently socially situated to themselves and examine how differences in social and/or ethnic background shape and impact on those relationships, addressing in particular the ways in which those differences are routinely negotiated and managed. Through a qualitative study of children's friendships in urban primary schools, their parents' thoughts on these and the adults' own experiences of socially and/or ethnically mixed friendships, we will contribute both theoretically and empirically to current debates around difference and diversity, social capital and social cohesion. Friendship is often assumed in policy and political terms to have an informal 'social glue' quality that has the potential to bring individuals together despite disparities and differences in their background. We will draw on the existing body of research on friendship and on social capital, which points to the possibilities and potentials of such friendships, and we will address the lack of empirically informed knowledge as to how such friendships are made, maintained, missed and interrupted in social environments characterised by extensive social difference and division.
The project is focused on the friendships adults and children make in and through primary schools. In super-diverse localities, primary schools can be places where adults and children who have very different lives are likely to meet and interact. We are interested in what adults think about their connections and relations with other parents and their children's friendships with their peers. In this context the project addresses how these relationships and friendships contribute to parents feeling part of - and taking part in - a school community and in how these experiences of friendship facilitate a sense of embedded-ness and belonging to the localities in which people live. The research will generate a data base of just under 100 individual and group interviews. This will comprise 72 in-depth interviews with teachers, headteachers, and parents, and 18-21 group discussions with primary school children (age 8/9), based on visual representations (socio-graphs) of their friendships. Interview themes will include: the teachers' views on the amount of social mixing visible in the children's friendships, and the school's contribution to school-community cohesion; the children's description of both positive and difficult points in their friendships, their awareness and negotiation of difference; and parents' understanding of and reactions to their children's friendships, how they and their children react to and seek to manage moments of difference, as well as parents' own friendship patterns and experiences. Our data will contribute empirical evidence to the often rather abstract debates on social cohesion; assess the potential of individual friendships to contribute towards that cohesion in heterogeneous areas, and offer data evaluating the role of the school in contributing to the development of resilient mixed communities and social cohesion.
Amount: £261,600
Funding type: research
Start date: 2013-02-11
End date: 2015-06-29
Funded outputs count: 9
Funder award ID: ES/K002384/1
OpenAlex ID: G1855754276