Abstracts

The years children spent in early education in relation to their social relations and objects of attention: Lasten varhaiskasvatuksessa viettämien vuosien yhteys lasten sosiaaliseen orientaatioon ja suuntautumiseen

by Aada Heikkilä

Objectives. The purpose of this article- based master´s thesis is to study the connection between the years children spent in early childhood education and care (ECEC) and their social behaviour. The research problems were formed based on the fourfold table of social orientations by Jyrki Reunamo (2020) and the research material. In this research I decided to concentrate on the years children spent in ECEC because earlier research concerning children´s social behaviour is often focused on the quality of ECEC. This research presents one perspective to the social debate about how ECEC affects children´s growth and development by describing how the years spent in ECEC affect children´s social orientations and their main object of attention and contact. Methods. The data used in this research is a part of already existing research material collected within the Progressive Feedback project. The data was collected by observing children in ECEC units in 2017- 2021. About 200 specially trained ECEC professionals performed the observations. The research data includes 20 457 observations of 972 six-year-olds from 360 child groups in 18 municipalities in Finland. The material was analysed with IBM SPSS Statistics 27 programme with crosstabulation function using the years of attendance in ECEC, social orientation, child´s main object of attention and contact, closest social child contact and child´s gender as variables. Results and conclusions. According to this research, the years children spent in ECEC have a connection to their social orientations and their main object of attention and contact. The longer the children had been in ECEC, the less adaptive behaviour was observed. The children that had been in ECEC for under a year were observed to be less participative than other children. Dominant orientation increased the longer the children had been in ECEC. The children that had been in ECEC for over four years aimed their attention more rarely to non-social objects and adults. These same children aimed their attention more often to several children than their peers that had spent fewer years in ECEC. The years spent in ECEC seem to affect girls´ and boys´ social orientations and main object of attention and contact differently. The results could be useful when political decisions concerning ECEC, for example the two year-long pre-primary education, are made. The article The years children spent in early education in relation to their social relations and objects of attention is supposed to be published in European Early Childhood Education Research Journal (EECERJ)