Ethnicity and social relations : A case study of how nine pupils' ethnic background affects their social relationships at school

This study aims to examine how the students ethnic background affects them in their social relationships at school. The main research questions in this study have been: How does the ethnic background of students affect there social relationships with their friends at school? How does the identity creates and develop in the context of social relationships? What significance does the language that is spoken hold in the social relationships of the children The main research questions have been investigated based on the students perspective, where the two main methods were individual interviews and observation on the schoolyard during recess. The interviews and observations where carried out at eight informants with three different ethnic backgrounds. The three ethnic backgrounds were Swedish, Somali, and Syrian. The results of the study showed in the interviews that no one of the informants differentiated themselves from their friends who came from different ethnic backgrounds from which they did, they did not categorize themselves based upon their ethnicity. However, worth emphasizing is that the observations showed that what the students said in the interviews was not always, what happened in practice. The conclusion of this study is that ethnicity does not affect the students when choosing their friends, at least not in the same proportion as language does. In addition, the choice of friends was more affected by the residential area, which the informants lived in, more so than by their ethnic background.