Browsing by Author "Antola, Hanna"

Objectives: The objective of this study was to find out the meanings of laundry washing in home economics textbooks, as well as to find out how these meanings reflect the objectives of laundry washing defined in curriculums. It was proposed that home economics textbooks had little content on laundry washing compared to content on other topics, and that the existing content on laundry washing was rather concise. Previous research on home economics textbooks has not been conducted, but research comparing the contents of geography textbooks with curriculums shows that the contents of textbooks reflects the objectives of the curriculums rather well. Methods: The material used for this study consisted of ten home economics textbooks written between 1970 and 2015. Two textbooks representing two publishers were chosen from each decade. The textbooks were compared with primary school curriculums published during each decade. Content analysis was used to study the different themes occurring in the textbooks. The different areas researched included laundry washing, laundry washing by hand, laundry drying, the ecological and economical aspects of laundry washing, the environment, allergies and different materials. The objectives related to laundry washing were first identified from the textbooks after which they were compared with the contents of the textbooks. Results: The contents of the textbooks reflected the objectives defined in the curriculums on each decade rather well. The content related to laundry washing was concise in each textbook that was studied. The biggest percentage of content related to laundry washing compared with the rest of the content was 5,9 % whereas the smallest percentage was 1,4 %. Many of the books discussed the topic in a broad scale regardless of the few pages designated to the topic. The newer the textbook the more the topic of this study was discussed. However, the pages designated to laundry washing did not increase in the newer textbooks. Even though the topic of laundry washing is often less significant, the topic is discussed in a broad scale fulfilling the objectives of the curriculums rather well.