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The intention is to introduce the conceptual framework proposed by Brown, Odom, and Conroy (2001) for the implementation of social interaction intervention. This tiered system organizes intervention strategies for early childhood professionals to make informed decision on how to promote social interactions of young children who are at risk for social competence difficulties in inclusive early childhood programs.

The purpose of this study initially was to explore how graduate teaching assistants’ (GTAs) peer-to-peer interactions in a teaching development seminar (TEAC 530, offered at Midwestern State University) shaped their experiences in the seminar. However, as this study unfolded, the author learned that the neoliberal social structure enveloping TEAC 530 informed how GTAs interacted with their peers. It became necessary to interrogate how the seminar, against a neoliberal backdrop, shaped GTAs’ interactions.

Using an ethnographic methodological approach, this inquiry drew from fieldnotes from 21 different TEAC 530 sessions, with collection occurring over the course of 15 months. This project also drew upon 18 semi-structured interviews and analysis of relevant documents.

Neoliberalism’s influence on TEAC 530’s structure and learning goals created conditions that did not forge strong GTA peer connections; the extent to which GTAs got to know each other and build relationships was questionable. Fruitful working peer relationships were inconsistent, making it challenging for GTAs to learn and contrast their experiences and understandings about teaching with peers.

Neoliberalism’s influence on TEAC 530 undermined the seminar’s community of practice design, limiting the scope and depth of GTAs’ peer interactions, which in turn limited the facilitation of GTAs’ teaching preparation.

This chapter investigates children’s play and social interactions in a multilingual preschool context where the lingua franca (common language) is English. This investigation follows the experiences of one child for whom English is a second language (L2). The analytic focus explores how the child gains access and participation in play activities in relation to the peer culture of the group.

Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis approaches, this chapter offers turn-by-turn analysis to show how the children’s interactions unfold and identifies children’s interactional approaches as they enter play and make friends. Particular attention is focused on how one of the children manages his attempts at entry into the peer group’s games using the building blocks.

The close detailed analysis of one extended episode highlighted the co-produced nature of interaction. The findings identify a repertoire of four resources used by one of the L2 children within the peer group, to access play activities in the building space: (1) linguistic resources of requests, such as “Can I play?” “Are you building?”; (2) “tailing” others closely; (3) references to the moral obligations of being a best friend; and (4) using objects as resources for entry. While the analytic focus is on one child’s strategies, analysis considers this child’s individual actions in relation to his peers. What is made apparent is that children’s uptake and participation in peer interaction is dependent on the social agenda and the local aspects of peer culture, not solely on children's language proficiency.

Attention to how children employ strategies to play and understanding the local conditions of peer culture can assist educators to support children’s attempts for participation and friendship in multilingual early years settings.

Learner-centered interactions determine the look and feel of online courses, influencing the way learners experience them. In this chapter we investigate considerations related to three types of interactions: learner–content, learner–instructor, and learner–learner. Learners interact with content through the course structure and layout. They also interact with peers who may be cast in the role of community members, there to provide social support, or they may be more prominently cast as information providers and/or collaborators. The learner is at the center of both content and peer interactions. Instructor interactions set expectations for learners and facilitate learner interactions with content and peers. Instructors are instrumental forces in bringing about connections between learners, enabling the social presence necessary for collaboration. Instructor interaction may also be relational, enabling individualized connections between learners and the instructor. Redesign decisions center on creating a course structure that fits the learner and content and results in a satisfying course experience. We use the power of metaphor to bring into focus the most relevant considerations. In the end, we illustrate the redesign of a single course through the lens of three separate metaphors to demonstrate how metaphor shapes the process, bringing together design and interaction decisions to create unique and elegant course designs.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine everyday multilingual peer play interactions through their implications for the development of friendships among immigrant children.

Bringing together linguistic anthropology and conversation analysis as methodological approaches, this chapter explores friendship processes among Moroccan immigrant girls in Spain, specifically by analyzing the structure and composition of one such peer group, as well as their multilingual and multimodal interactions.

The main findings are that the multi-age, mixed-expertise composition of this peer group, as well as the semiotically flexible forms of participation and interaction that it encourages, are conducive to remarkably inclusive groups and strong friendships among a diverse group of Moroccan immigrant girls (including, younger and older girls, girls with disabilities and girls with very different immigration histories). Solid inclusive friendships are cemented in this peer interactional environment first because being able to interchangeably negotiate expert/novice participation roles in game interactions affirms feelings of social competence among all the girls, and second because achieving shared understandings in play entails successfully negotiating rules and expectations, which promotes trust and collaboration, while minimizing conflict. The inclusive nature of these girls’ peer-groups contrasts with the exclusion they encounter in other social settings and relationships.

In this sense, this chapter has important implications for understanding immigrant children’s abilities to respond to forms of social exclusion by forming diverse peer groups and strong friendships of their own. These friendships offer them a path to combat the marginalization they experience in other domains of social life.

Online health question-and-answer (Q&A) forums have developed a new business model whereby listeners (peer patients) can pay to read health information derived from consultations between askers (focal patients) and answerers (physicians). However, research exploring the mechanism behind peer patients' purchase decisions and the specific nature of the information driving these decisions has remained limited. This study aims to develop a theoretical model for understanding how peer patients make such decisions based on limited information, i.e. the first question displayed in each focal patient-physician interaction record, considering argument quality (interrogative form and information details) and source credibility (patient experience of focal patients), including the contingent role of urgency.

The model was tested by text mining 1,960 consultation records from a popular Chinese online health Q&A forum on the Yilu App. These records involved interactions between focal patients and physicians and were purchased by 447,718 peer patients seeking health-related information until this research.

Patient experience embedded in focal patients' questions plays a significant role in inducing peer patients to purchase previous consultation records featuring exchanges between focal patients and physicians; in particular, increasingly detailed information is associated with a reduced probability of making a purchase. When focal patients demonstrate a high level of urgency, the effect of information details is weakened, while the interrogative form is strengthened.

The originality of this study lies in its exploration of the monetization mechanism forming the trilateral relationship between askers (focal patients), answerers (physicians) and listeners (peer patients) in the business model “paying to view others' answers” in the online health Q&A forum and the moderating role of urgency in explaining the mechanism of how first questions influence peer patients' purchasing behavior.

Purpose – Disputes provide a way for children to negotiate how they stand in relationship to one another in the local peer group interaction (Goodwin, 1990, 2006). This study follows the everyday peer disputes and classroom negotiations of a peer group of 8-year-old to 12-year-old Turkish–English speaking (and Meskhetian Turkish–English–Russian speaking) children attending a Turkish Saturday School in the United States, where a monolingual Turkish norm is projected by the teachers, to see how these institutional language norms are used as a resource for the peers to conduct their everyday interactions.

Methodology/approach – This study combines methods of ethnography (data are drawn from a year-long ethnography which followed children's everyday language practices in two school settings) and talk-in-interaction, specifically Membership Categorization Analysis (Sacks, 1972, 1992).

Findings – Children draw upon the monolingual school norm of using Turkish only, and speaking Turkish correctly, by way of positioning themselves moment-to-moment during disputes with one another. Through repeated appeals to their teachers to relax the Turkish-only rule, they also collaboratively index “speaking English” as a positive category-bound activity (Cekaite & Evaldsson, 2008; Evaldsson, 2007), influencing the local moral order of the peer group.

Social implications/originality/value of chapter – The study provides a view of how children living in a transnational society orient to wider societal structures and “build the phenomenal and social worlds they inhabit” (Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2012) as part of their everyday disputes and negotiations with one another.

The purpose of this paper is to capitalise on three waves of longitudinal data from a cohort of 4,351 secondary school pupils to examine the effects on individuals’ cannabis use uptake of both peer cannabis use and position within a peer network.

Both cross-sectional and individual fixed effects models are used to estimate the effect on cannabis use of nominated friends’ cannabis use, of reciprocity and transitivity of nominations across the friendship cluster, and of interactions between these nominated friends. Post hoc analyses parsed the behaviour of reciprocating and non-reciprocating friends.

Cannabis use varied depending on the stability of friendship network and the degree of reciprocity and interconnectedness within the group. Behavioural influence was strong, but interaction effects were observed between the prevalence of cannabis use among friends, the structure of the friendship group and ego’s proximity to group members. These interactions demonstrate that behavioural influence is more salient in more cohesive groups. When reciprocating and non-reciprocating friends’ mean cannabis use were separated, influence from reciprocating friends was estimated at twice the magnitude of other friends.

While preventing any one individual from using cannabis is likely to have a multiplier effect on classmates, the bonds and interactions between classmates will determine which classmates are affected by this multiplier and the salience of that effect.

Drawing on research findings from an ethnography conducted with young children, exploring notions of difference, identity and peer interactions, this study uncovers how four- and five-year-olds initiated and maintained peer interactions within a linguistically diverse Early Years setting in the North of England.

This study adopted an applied ethnographic approach to gain the emic perspectives of children in the reception class at Sunnyside over a full academic year. Over the course of this school year I spent a day a week with the class undertaking non-participant and participant observations alongside unstructured informal conversations and focused on visual research activities.

Language and identity were closely intertwined in children’s patterns of interaction at Sunnyside. For some children language had a functional value while for others it was a symbolic marker of identity. Similarly, for some children their minority language held valuable linguistic capital while for others their first or home language was viewed as being something to shun. For all the children language was only one factor that played a role in initiating and maintaining their peer interactions at school. These implications will be discussed in this chapter.

Situated in a particular local context, this study provides an in-depth insight into the experiences of a linguistically diverse group of children from North and Sub-Saharan African countries who have come together in a single school setting where Somali and Arabic are the two key languages that are spoken by children in the class. This chapter discusses how these children viewed languages within the classroom context and how other identity markers associated with ethnicity, religion and nationality intersected with language within the context of ‘being friends’ at Sunnyside.

The purpose of this study is to extend the current understanding of virtual team (VT) workers’ willingness to continue working in VTs and the forces driving their affective reactions to teamwork. Specifically, this paper applies the input-mediator-output-input (IMOI) literature to investigate the influence of workers’ perceptions of their peers’ skills and peers’ interactions on perceptions of the teamwork process and subsequent affective reactions.

This paper draws on a sample of 997 virtual and face-to-face (FtF) students embedded in 242 project teams to test the hypotheses using multi-group comparisons in structural equation modeling (SEM).

Results support the assertion that team processes are essential in translating team skills and interactions into satisfaction with the team. Further, this paper finds that skills are more influential on teammate satisfaction for FtFs than they are for VTs; and, conversely, that VTs’ interactions are more pivotal regarding teammate satisfaction through VT processes than they are in FtFs.

The effort contributes to the IMOI literature by showing how teams overcome virtuality to perform effectively and how team-embedded members react differently across VT and FtF contexts.

These findings are particularly notable given that prior research has suggested VT performance may not be contingent on social bonds within the team. Although this is possibly true for performance, the findings suggest that social interactions are, in fact, crucial to teams’ affective reactions.