Groups Matter: Investigating the Effects of Homophily in Child Interactions in an Inclusive Classroom

Le résumé fourni par la source

Children’s interactions with peers are central to their social, emotional, linguistic, and cognitive development. While research has focused on children’s pairwise associations, less attention has been given to the characteristics of larger groups of children. This study highlights the importance of a group perspective by exploring whether homophily—the tendency to interact with similar others—extends beyond pairs to groups of children. To identify pairwise interactions between children, we use social contact criteria, and for interacting groups, we operationalize them as F-formations, a widely used concept in computational research for detecting adult groups. We conducted a case study in an inclusive preschool classroom over two consecutive years, involving two different cohorts of children with hearing loss (HL) and with typical hearing (TH). Our findings show that children tend to form groups, particularly groups of size 3 to 5. Homophily is evident among children with TH in both pairs and groups, while for children with HL, homophily is suggested only at the group level. Group-level analysis also reveals patterns not observed in pairwise interactions, such as TH children’s lower overall likelihood of being in a group and their tendency to associate with groups containing a higher proportion of TH peers. These findings suggest that incorporating group interactions provides a more comprehensive understanding of children’s sociality, capturing patterns that cannot be explained by pairwise analysis alone.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.