Peer Group

Recent theoretical approaches to children and childhood studies have viewed children and their peer cultures as worthy of documentation and study in their own right. Childhood sociologist William Corsaro defines peer culture as a stable set of activities, artifacts, values, and concerns that children engage in and share in interaction with their peers. It has been suggested that one fundamental feature of peer talk and social interactions is their co-constitutive relation to the shared worlds of childhood culture, and that peer interactions can be seen as a major resource in cultural and relational work.

Peer group studies diverge from tradition psychological research by focusing on children’s social practices and examining how children use cultural resources to build their social worlds, which can be very different from ...