Cultural encapsulation of children’s friendships: A manifestation of prejudice or pride?

The overarching purposes of this paper are to consider the ways in which friendship between children and adolescents can be understood and to offer suggestions for how schools can facilitate such friendship. The paper begins by providing some general perspective on the immigrant experience. It continues with some basic definitions of friendship and culture. The history of research on intercultural friendship is considered next, in both quantitative terms – the extent of intercultural friendship– and qualitative terms –the differentfeatures of intercultural and intracultural friendship. The paper concludes with the author’s views about how intercultural friendship should be best understood and with suggestions for how to encourage it.