Friendship Development among Children in School

This book reports the author's five-month ethnography of first-grade children's friendships. It is the first detailed investigation of the dynamic, psychosocial processes by which young children formulate friendships in school. The book addresses two major questions: How does the social-ecology of a public school classroom affect children's interactions and peer relations, and what are the important psychosocial processes by which children initiate and cultivate friendships at school. The book aims to generate hypotheses about friendship development among young children, and specifically, to identify the chain of events by which children come to consider themselves friends and to analyze these events from a developmental perspective.