Ethnicity and Friendship: the contrast between sociometric research and fieldwork observation in primary school classrooms

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Abstract
Sociometric research in racially mixed primary schools has revealed considerable ethnic bias in patterns of friendship choice. Teachers in such schools, however, tend to reject such research because the findings run contrary to their own experience. The teachers tend to perceive a considerable level of friendship and integration between pupils of different ethnic origins. This paper investigates the dissonance between teachers' perceptions and the research results through a direct comparison of findings from two methods of “seeing what is really happening” in the classroom: sociometric testing and protracted fieldwork observation. The comparison of the two sets of findings highlights the inherent limitations of sociometric testing and points to those aspects of inter‐pupil contact that are likely to form the basis of teachers' perceptions of the friendship choices of pupils.