Browsing by Author "Suoranta, Tuuli"

Introduction. The objective with this study was to gather information about how preschool aged children act prosocially. Prosocial acting and prosocial behavior are described as the same concept in this study. Prosocial behavior is positive social behavior which purpose is to promote someone other’s wellbeing. Such as behaviors are for example helping, sharing, comforting and cooperating. In the theory part I clarified prosocial behavior through the previous theories and research information and also with the related concepts as social learning, altruism, moral reasoning, empathy and sympathy. Previous researches had been focusing mostly to that part of prosocial behavior, which expounds why or how human species act prosocially, and for that reason there exists plenty of theories and research information of this perspective through decades. Because of this lack of information, in this study I want to search answer to the question how conventionally identified prosocial actings appear with preschool aged children Methodology. The material of survey was collected by systematic literature review. There were two databases where I found 218 researches, and in total four of the researches I picked for the complete survey material. The original researches and studies were international which specified the age limit of preschooler’s between 3 to 6. In the selected researches and studies prosocial behavior was described closely and they had effectual influence on the study designs and to the gained results. None of the selected researches or studies did only enter into gain information how preschool aged children act prosocially. The collected qualitative survey material was analyzed with the inductive content analysis. Results and conclusions. The results clearly show that preschool aged children act prosocially in multitudinious ways. I divided the prosocial acts, which emerged from the survey results, to the six categories. These were comforting, helping, friendliness, sharing, defending and cooperating. The prosocial behavior was tangible, physical, verbal and affective. Voluntarily helping, inviting other children to the play and taking along her/him to the play was the most popular ways to act prosocially. The conclusions of this study is that preschool aged children ways to act prosocially are highly diverse and those acts promote social interaction positively. Nevertheless this study’s results and conclusions prosocial behavior doesn’t seem to be very trendy among educators when today’s society visibly recommends individualism and efficacy as a virtue.