Introduction
This paper provides a review of two articles that focus on the development of social skills that will arguably enhance a child’s social capital. Porath’s (2009) research paper appears to have provided evidence that a teacher’s instructions during pre-school education can act as a pathway from one stage of child development to the following stage of development, and in so doing, building social skills and presumably enhancing social capital. Anderson’s (2008) article seemed to suggest that the classroom can be used as an area in which to develop social skills, thereby enhancing a child’s social capital. ‘Social capital’ is concerned with the development of ‘trust between people’ to generate ‘strong social networks’ (Hargreaves, 2001). Both articles will be analysed to assess how they relate to one another and various elements of each, including their approach, assumptions, research tasks and findings will be compared and contrasted. Prior to this analysis, there will be a brief discussion of the research process, detailing the focus, rationale and search procedures for this paper.
The research focus and rationale
The two papers were specifically chosen for this review because they deal with a similar research area, the development of social skills in young children, which arguably enhances social capital and academic achievement. The topic of the development of social skills was chosen as the main focus of this review as a result of my belief that social capital is a vital component of a young child’s development, particularly primary school children, and it is improved with particular social skills. Interestingly, most papers have been written by male researchers. The two papers selected for review are based in countries that do not share the same educational system, and were written almost at the same time, in 2008 and 2009.They have been written by female researchers; many papers have commonly been written by male researchers. The two papers were also chosen because they had contrasting paradigms and contrasting methodologies. Anderson’s (2008) research derived from an educational economics perspective, whereas Porath came from a developmental psychological perspective. Anderson (2008) applied a quantitative research method and used statistics to produce her results and Porath (2009) used a rather more qualitative research approach, although she applied a standard deviation test to the measures of the children’s narratives.
Search procedures
Time was spent initially refining the review’s focus, including a definition of boundaries. Various key words, such as social skills, social capital, primary school instruction, pre-school and academic achievements were identified in order to use various means of electronic searching. As Evans and Benefield (2001) and the Open University (2007) discovered, some relevant papers were unavailable as a result of copyright/publishing issues but time did not permit a hand-search, which would have been the practice if writing a complete review. After extensive electronic searching, no articles with an identical focus of social capital, using two different research approaches were found. Consequently two papers were chosen that discussed the development of social skills, in the belief that social skills, as mentioned above are essential for developing social capital. Anderson (2008) linked the development of social skills in the classroom to the enhancement of social capital. Porath (2009) implied that social skills tend to enhance social capital. The influence of political agendas was prevalent and reflected in a large proportion of the papers. A lot of the USA and UK papers were responses to intervention programmes, often government sponsored. Indeed, Anderson’s (2008) paper is based on a series of intervention initiatives. Much research has concentrated on examining the outcome of specific intervention methods funded partly by various governments, for example, the SEAL project, (Hallam, 2009; Humphrey et al., 2009, 2010a, 2010b; Lendrum, et al., 2009 and Thompson and Smith, 2011). Politically sensitive issues, such as truancy, Thompson (2011), delinquent behaviour and mental health, Wells et al., (2003).
Over the past decade, world-wide concern has emerged over the social capital of young people. It is reflected in a growing number of research papers in this area. This is partly in response to civil order issues (Petrides, et al., 2004). As recently as the summer of 2011, riots occurred in three major cities in the UK during one week. Mainly young people looted and destroyed property. As a result, a wide-ranging dearth of social skills was identified together with a general lack of empathy.
The
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