Browsing by Author "Nikula, Venla"

The aim of this study was to investigate, based on previous studies, the togetherness of the day care group from children’s perspective. The only research problem is ”How do children create and express togetherness according to previous studies in a day care group?” The togetherness was, in this study, referred to the interrelationship between group members. There is often a lot of talk about a good class spirit, but less often about the good spirit in day care group. However, togetherness and its consideration in day care is very important for the well-being of the child. A day care group is most often the first experience of a community for a child, so feeling of togetherness is important to make the child’s first experience of the own community as positive as possible. This promotes community action in later life. I executed my research as a descriptive literature review. There were five different articles in the review that treated my topic from the point of view of children, but focusing on the subject from a slightly different perspective. As one of the ways of conducting a literature review, I ended up classifying the articles that rose from my articles. In my research, it turned out that children use many different ways to create and express togetherness in a day care group. I composed these ways into eight separate themes, which then were classified into two classes according to the themes’ main way of expressing togetherness. These two classes were functional way of creating and expressing togetherness and verbal way of creating and expressing togetherness. One of these themes was left the division because it was so strongly in both upper classes. Togetherness seems to be a broad and diverse factor in the peer culture of children. Future research should also pay attention to the adults’ perspective of togetherness in a day care group, do expressions of the togetherness focus to them at all, how do they affect togetherness, or do they take it into account at all and how they can contribute to the togetherness of their group.