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 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 | 0.024 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".