Social inclusion has been identified as a crucial means to prevent social problems such as crime and unemployment, namely by policy-makers in the European sphere (European Commission 2003). As such, striving for social inclusion in educational settings has become a particularly important policy goal (e.g. Micklewright 2002). Accordingly, social inclusion has grown to become a key concern in educational research, especially as educational agendas promoting ‘inclusion for all’ have been encouraged (Frederickson and Furnham 2001, Tisdall et al 2006, Murray and Lawson 2007, Bhalla and Lapeyre 2002).

Social inclusion is a multifaceted concept which has been defined in many different ways (Rinta et al 2011). In education, research has tended to operationalize social inclusion as either an ensemble of psychological phenomena (typically feelings of acceptance in a social group or of ‘belonging’ in school, e.g. Baumeister et al 2005, Leary et al 2005) or a host of sociological factors (for instance equity in access to resources and achievement, e.g. Burnard et al 2008), with little overlap. In policy discourses, social inclusion is defined yet differently as the inverse of social exclusion, which consists in the presence of a combination of economic factors (Office of National Statistics, 2011, European Commission 2008). Yet there is little agreement across different areas of research as to whether social inclusion is the opposite - or not - of social exclusion (Rinta et al 2011). This lack of harmonisation in definitions has arguably complicated the process of monitoring social inclusion across contexts (Rinta et al 2011), and thus the process of establishing it as a robust concept meriting further study.

The present study argues that Social Network Analysis (SNA), an approach which has grown in popularity in educational research in the past 20 years (Carolan 2014), provides a unique opportunity to bridge the aforementioned definitions of social inclusion. This will be done in two parts. Firstly, the study will examine the implications of the structuralist premises of social network analysis (Carolan 2014) for sociological and psychological theories related to social inclusion (see Methodology section). Secondly, the study will answer the following research questions:

-Do certain social network structures in friendship networks predict higher levels of ‘social inclusion’ across individuals as defined both by psychological and sociological factors (see above)?

-Do individuals sharing the same positions in friendship networks tend to be ‘socially included’ according to both psychological an sociological factors?

-Do network structures which are predictive of high levels of social exclusion, as conceptualised in European discourses (e.g. European Commission 2003), also predict lower levels of social inclusion according to the aforementioned various definitions?

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