Many countries experience large-scale migration with immigrant children experiencing new countries, new surroundings and schools. Although many immigrant students may display general optimism about opportunities in their new country, many obstacles remain to be solved. The adaptation of these new students is often evaluated from their school engagement (Suárez-Orozco, 2001). Recently Chiu et al. (2012) published an OECD-PISA-study from 41 countries around the world, 27 of them European states, showing that immigrant 15-year-old students had better attitudes toward school compared to native students, but weaker sense of belonging to school.  In pre-adolescence interaction of group members of the same age is important (Lease, Musgrove, & Axelrod, 2002). Children with low acceptance by their peers have more limited opportunities to adapt socially, which might also undermine their academic progress (Parker, & Asher, 1987). Especially learners with uneven profiles, which may be the case with many immigrant children, may benefit from interaction with peers (O’Donnell (2006). When pupils experience only rare positive relationships in their neighbourhood outside of school they become more dependent on relationships within the school they belong to. It is essential that the school institution demonstrates coherent strategies towards behaviour in order to promote relationships with all members (Roffey, 2012).  Apart from acceptance and good relationships with peers and students’ learning, teacher-student relationship plays an important part of student well-being at school, and the feeling of belonging to school. A high scoring of well-being in a classroom is connected to a number of critical issues with impact on educational outcomes (Holfve-Sabel, 2014a).

Interethnic contact has been shown to be positively related to favourable out-group attitudes in a majority of studies compiled by Pettigrew and Tropp (2006). It cannot be assumed from their study, however, that ethnically mixed schools will promote more tolerant attitudes to immigrants generally, since they did not investigate mixed group settings and the studies mostly concerned interracial attitudes. Recently Janmaat (2014) published an investigation of 14-year-old native students’ attitudes to inclusion views of immigrants, covering 14 countries, 13 of them European. He found that inclusiveness was much stronger in countries with substantially more second than first generation immigrant students. He concluded that this discrepancy may be a temporary problem.

Sweden has experienced an increasing residential segregation (Yang Hansen & Gustafsson, 2012), and there is great variability of ethnicity between school classes (Gustafsson, 2006). In a recently published study including 1697 students from 78 classes in Göteborg it was found that students’ choice of peers to work with during lessons had an equal strength of coherence, independent of the type of network, i.e. Scandinavian, non-Scandinavian or mixed origin (Holfve-Sabel, 2014b). Segregation within schools thus was at least partly neutralized by peer effects seen in students’ voluntary choices. 

The present investigation is exploring a spectrum of attitudes to school, teacher and relations to peers offering a more complete picture of students’ adaptation to their school class and the dependence of the type of network the students’ voluntary have chosen during breaks.

The research questions more generally were: Are there any difference between networks of Scandinavian, non-Scandinavian or mixed composition in attitudes to school factors and relational factors?

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