Putting the Circle back into Circle of Friends: A grounded theory study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Circle of Friends (CoF) was originally developed in Canada as a social tool for including vulnerable children and adults within their mainstream schools or communities (Pearpoint et al., 1992). It has subsequently been adopted by schools in the UK as a strategy for including pupils, with a range of challenging needs or behaviours, who have become rejected by or isolated from their peers. This paper examines the contribution of CoF towards achieving positive outcomes for socially isolated children in schools. It reviews evidence from current qualitative and quantitative studies and a Grounded Theory (GT) research study undertaken by the lead author. The design involved interviews with 25 facilitators of CoF within mainstream schools in a large Shire County and an outer London suburb. The children comprising the CoF groups ranged in age from 7 to 12 years. The psycho-social processes emerging from the analysis provide theoretical insights into the part played by the Circle group in providing social feedback and support for the focus child and promoting more positive relationships with the wider class group. At its highest level of conceptualisation the final theory describes how a CoF is perceived to facilitate the movement of a pupil from a ‘closed’ or isolated, social field towards more ‘open’, peer based networks of social support. Implications for future research are discussed. It is argued that complex humanist interventions need to be evaluated and developed using ecologically sensitive methods.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.036 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".