Uteslutning och inneslutning : En observationsstudie om hur förskolebarn skapar kamratrelationer

Sammanfattning: Preschool is an important social arena for children. This might be the first time that children find themselves in a larger social context and create their first peer-relations. The aim of this study was to examine children’s peer-relations with particular focus on the acts of social exclusion and inclusion, and how children use different strategies to exclude and include each other. Another aim was to investigate how both verbal and non-verbal communication is used in these processes. This study has an ethnographic approach, and the use of video observation as a method enabled us to capture the children’s everyday interactions at preschool. Our results show that children use a number of different strategies to exclude other children that seek access to an ongoing activity to protect the interactional space that they already share. We have seen how children claim access to objects and space, how they say no without explanations, how they tell each other they are not friends and how they refer to arbitrary rules. We have also seen how the children ignore those that seek access to the activity, how they create lies and how they move away from the current location. Children’s interaction with each other is to a large extent about sorting and organizing their peer-relations, and communication is very important in this process. The verbal and non-verbal communication is used to organize the acts of inclusion and exclusion and these acts are important parts of the organization of children’s peer-relations.