How Peer Networks Enable and Constrain Children’s Democratic Practices in Primary School

This dataset documents an educational action research project conducted in a single early primary classroom in Poland (N = 19; aged 8–9) between 2022 and 2024. The study examines how children experience and interpret the relationship between their position within the peer network and their opportunities to participate in everyday democratic practices in the classroom (e.g., expressing views, co-decision-making, shared responsibility).The data were collected as part of the National Science Centre (NCN, Poland) Preludium grant no. 2023/49/N/HS6/03767.The dataset covers three action-research cycles and integrates multiple sources of evidence through methodological triangulation: (1) repeated measures of peer relations used for social network analysis (SNA), (2) 57 semi-structured interviews with children focused on their lived experiences of participation and voice, and (3) unstructured classroom observations recorded in the researcher’s field diary. Together, these materials enable analyses of changes in peer-network structure and the accompanying shifts in children’s experiences across successive cycles of pedagogical intervention.The dataset is suitable for secondary analyses of the interplay between peer relations, children’s agency, and the inclusiveness of democratic practices in early primary education, including comparative work and qualitative and network-based re-analyses.