Brain Bigelow, John La Gaipa and William Corsaro have both made important contributions into understanding how children interpret “friendship”. Bigelow and La Gaipa carried out one of the first studies from what was a very under researched area. Bill Corsaro, a key figure in childhood studies, was particularly successful in gaining access into young children's worlds which has helped shape a further picture of this somewhat intriguing definition. Brace and Byford (2012)

One similarity is that they both aimed to study friendships in children and to also provide a persuasive explanation into this. A further similarity was in their methods used for measuring their research, as both initially used a qualitative approach.

Bigelow and La
Bigelow and La Gaipa's study collected essays from children between the ages of 6 – 14years, on the one hand this allowed children to write openly about their personal views on what friendship means to them, and also enabled Bigelow and La Gapia to compile such a large sample, but on the other hand thought may need to be taken how younger children would be able to explain their definition of a best friend in written form. Namely, they may find it difficult to express themselves properly this way.
Nevertheless the outcome provided some interesting findings concerning how children's expectations of friendship changes and develops as children get older. Bigelow and La Gapia proposed that the findings of the study could be thought out in a three stage model such as, firstly children saw friendship based on similarities in play and activities, then shifts to more about dependability and sharing, to finally more a focus on similar interests, loyalty and intimate relationships. These results therefore proposed that as children develop so do their friendship requirements. Brace and Byford (2012)as cited in Bigelow and La Gapia (1975).

However even though Corsaro wasn't interested in turning his results into quantitative data or frequency counts his approach into children’s friendship still posed another question of how easy it would be to blend in with the children due to adults being larger physically and how a child perceives an adult, and in addition how to