AbstractsPsychology

This dissertation focuses on children s sense of agency. The aim is to investigate the kinds of agentic experiences children undergo in their everyday lives and examine the kinds of events and activities in which these experiences take place. The dissertation thereby seeks to contribute to current understandings of the particularity of individual engagement in collective activities and enrich descriptions of the connectedness of individual and social level processes. To understand children s agentic experiences from their perspective, this dissertation employs and develops co-participatory visual methods for studying children s sense of agency. The empirical data analyzed here come from two different case studies in which preschoolers and elementary school pupils documented their agentic experiences, and then reflected on these experiences in either open-ended interviews or joint focus groups. The empirical analysis focuses on the social construction of children s sense of agency in these reflection situations. In addition, the role of the visual tools as part of the reflection situations is examined via embodied interaction analysis. The results of the dissertation demonstrate the different ways in which children experience their agency in everyday life. Analysis of how sense of agency is socially constructed provides evidence that children s accounts of their agentic experiences range from straightforward statements to complex reports. Furthermore, the results suggest that children s agentic experiences take place in mundane and ordinary events in addition to special occasions. The results also show how the visual tools served acted as mediational means in the telling and listening that took taking place in the reflection situations. Overall, the dissertation results suggest that parents, educators, and other professionals who want to encourage and foster children s sense of agency could benefit from paying attention to the small agentic moments in children s daily lives as potential growth points for the children s awareness of their own agency. The visual documentation methods employed and developed in the course of this research could function as a meaningful pedagogical practice in this regard. Tämä väitöskirja käsittelee lasten toimijuuden tunnetta. Tutkimuksen tavoitteena on selvittää millaisia lasten toimijuuden kokemuksen ovat heidän arjessaan ja minkälaisissa tilanteissa he kokevat olevansa toimijoita. Väitöskirja pyrkii näin lisäämään ymmärrystämme yksilöllisen osallistumisen erityispiirteistä ja rikastamaan yksilöiden ja yhteisen toiminnan välisiä yhteyksiä koskevia Ymmärtääkseen lasten toimijuuden tunnetta lasten omasta näkökulmasta, tässä väitöskirjassa sovelletaan ja kehitetään osallistavia visuaalisia tutkimusmenetelmiä lasten toimijuuskokemusten tutkimiseen. Tutkimuksen empiirinen aineisto koostuu lasten kanssa käydyistä reflektiivisistä keskusteluista. Ennen keskusteluita lapset dokumentoivat arkensa toimijuuskokemuksia digikameroiden avulla. Myöhemmin he reflektoivat näitä kokemuksiaan…