ABSTRACT
The analysis of friends and fights derives from recorded conversations with a group of children aged ten to eleven years, which took place at their school over a period of one year. The conversations on these tapes are generally about topics the children themselves wished to discuss: problems they were currently having with their various schoolteachers and with each other. Over a period of time, as their classroom lives were disrupted by the arrival of new teachers, and their classroom lives were disrupted by the arrival of new teachers, and their social lives were disrupted by the on-going squabbles they had amongst themselves, I began to see how these squabbles made sense from their point of view. Closer analysis of the tapes revealed the complexities involved in verbal exchanges where one ‘comes to know’ what the other means, and also reveals the creative work involved on the part of researcher and researched in producing sensible constructions given the available information—this is discussed and demonstrated in Davies (1978). While cognisance will be taken of this dimension in this paper the central interest is with the coherence of what the children do, given their perspective.
