compare and contrast how content analysis and ethnographic research have been used to study children's understanding of friendship.

Friendship is a difficult concept to define as it means different things to different people, it could be said that age and culture can change how one looks at friendship. The simplest way to define friendship would be as a relationship between two people who consider themselves “friends”.
This essay will also consider the advantages, disadvantages, similarities and differences between two studies that used the content analysis approach and the ethnographic approach. When looking at both bigelow & la gaipa (1975) and william corsaro's (2006) studies I will also look at how there work as influenced future studies in this area of research and what criticism's have been made of there research.
When looking firstly at the content analysis approach that bigelow & la gaipa took,to that of corsaro and the ethnographic method there is at first stark similarity,both bigelow & la gaipa and corsaro's studies were looking at what a child's understanding of friendship was. However after the inital comparison the aims are actually quite different,as bigelow & la gaipa's aim was to investigate children's understanding of friendship,in contrast to william corsaro who investigated children's individual understanding of the word “friend” he was interested in how children talked to each other.
Basically the main difference is where corsaro explored the term “friend” and how children used the word. Bigelow & la gaipa wanted to know about actual relationship between children. For example william carsaro looked for interactions and communication between children in there own setting,whereas bigelow & la gaipa looked for specific terms used by the children that they had predetermined, this was done in written form in regards to what there expectations of friendship was.
It stands to reason that because of the different nature of what they wanted to investigate their methods would differ, Bigelow & la gaipa used content analysis as a method of collecting data, they did this by comparing and scoring children's individual written accounts of what they expected from their friendship, they went on to compare those to twenty_one expectations they had chosen prior to the study been carried out. In contrast to this william corsaro used ethnographic method to collect his data for example he made detailed notes and video recordings of childrens activities and interactions while in there normal everyday setting,unlike bigelow & la gaipa corsaros aim was to not look for categories that have been chosen in advance but to pull out from what participants have actually said (preserve perspective).
The difference in the methods they used ment that bigelow & la gaipa managed to get a large sample of evidence across a whole range of age groups, but lost a lot of depth of their information because they turned it into quantitative data however by doing so there were then able to do a numerical summary which allowed them to draw apon the differences between boys and girls, while william carsaro's method was rich in qualitative data it had a smaller sample and was very time consuming.
There is only one similarity here and that is both study's initial data was qualitative. Bigelow & la gaipa chose to then convert their original qualitative data into quantitative data with the idea of gaining a much larger sample and it was much more time effective.
One similarity of the two study's is that bigelow & la gaipa and william corsaro took childrens opinions of their friendship as sources of data, for example bigelow & la gaipa took personal accounts from children; william corsaro used the conversation between children. What is interesting here is that, again there is an initial similarity in methods; the procedures to collect this information were very different; bigelow & la gaipa used children aged six years old to fourteen years old whereas william corsaro only studied young children; also bigelow & la gaipa only studied same sex friendships; william carsaro with his ethnographic method did not apply this limitation. Both studies and there different methods are an important area for consideration as they both have there own merits and problems. For example, the content analysis approach used by bigelow & la gaipa, the written vocabulary available to a six year old may not be extensive enough to explain their friendship in the right terms whereas observing children in there own environment where the children feel relaxed may give more insight into their true understanding of the concept of friendship, on the other hand an adult placed in a child's environment maybe rather conspicuous, for example carsaro tried not to be seen as a typical adult, he wanted to sit on the side lines and let them draw him in, however the children called him big bill this shows the children still saw him as an adult (interview with william carsaro(2010) so this might effect the results on observation.
Bigelow & la gaipa study helped with our understanding of children's friendship as it showed how expectations of friends change as children get older, william carsaros study also gave interesting results; it showed how younger children could talk about friendship in more complex terms than previous research on the area suggested. Bigelow & la gaipa`s method also influenced other researchers to use the same content analysis essay style method, for example yorkys gonzalez (2004) wanted to explore the influence of culture through the comparison of friendships, gonzalez et el used the same method as bigelow & la gaipa, they asked 300 cuban and 294 canadian adolescents to write a personal essay about there own best friend of the same gender. They also used a set of pre determined categories that were very similar to those used by bigelow & la gaipa. Gonzalez et el was then able to find important differences and similarities between the two different cultured groups.
In conclusion, it is hard to say which method of study is more preferable, as you have seen throughout this essay there are many similarities and differences, also there are many advantages and disadvantages to both methods.
Both of the study's aims are important factors of understanding children's friendship and shed light on a area with very little previous research, the focus before bigelow & la gaipa's study at the time had only really focused on emotional relationships.
The work of bigelow & la gaipa showed a very good example how qualitative data can be changed into quantitative, however both bigelow & la gaipa and william carsaro's studies have brought much insight into understanding a child's friendship and how it can change through out there life.

References

Bigelow & la gaipa (1975) making friends in brace , n byford j. (eds) investigating psychology, oxford , university press/milton keynes, the open university

william carsaro (2006) making friends in brace, n byford j . (eds) investigating psychology, oxford, university press/milton keynes, the open university

yorkys gonzalez (2004) making friends in brace , n byford j. (eds) investigating psychology, oxford , university press/milton keynes, the open university

Interview with william carsaro (2010) (audio), dse141 discovering psychology , milton keynes , the open university

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