A Grounded Theory study of Circles of Friends groups: The power of the set-up meeting as a tool for opening the social field for isolated children in schools
Bibliographic record
Abstract
‘Circle of Friends’ (CoF) was originally developed in Canada as a social tool for including vulnerable children or adults within their mainstream communities (Pearpoint, Forest & Snow, 1992). Within the UK context, CoF has been increasingly introduced by schools as a strategy for including pupils, with a range of challenging needs or behaviours, who have become rejected by or isolated from their peers. The initial set-up meeting plays a critical role in establishing CoF interventions. The present paper focuses on a review of relevant qualitative and quantitative literature and a Grounded Theory analysis of a 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 participating in the CoF groups ranged in age from seven to twelve years. The psycho-social theories emerging from the analysis contribute to our understanding of the part played by the set-up meeting and ‘perspective taking’ in the initial stages of the change process. At its highest level of conceptualisation the final theory describes how a ‘Circle of Friends’ can facilitate the movement of a pupil from a ‘closed’ or isolated social field to more ‘open’, peer based, social relationships. Hypotheses for subsequent social action and future research are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".