Browsing by Author "Vähätalo, Niina"

Objective. The basis of this research is that in the children’s Early Childhood Education Plans (ECEP) should be documented every child’s personal needs for education. Hence in the ECEPs there should be found descriptions of children’s temperaments. The background of this thesis lies in the Thomas and Chess’s theory of temperament where temperament is thought to be consisting of nine temperamental traits: activity level, threshold of responsiveness, rhythmicity, mood, approach and withdrawal, adaptability, intensity of reaction, distractibility and attention span and persistence. These temperamental traits guide the forming of personality together with physical, psychological and social surroundings. The objective of this research was to describe how temperamental traits occur in the ECEPs. My research questions were: 1) How many times are temperamental traits described in the ECEPs? 2) In which way the temperamental traits are described? 3) Does gender, age or daycare group affect in the way temperamental traits are described in the ECEPs? Methods. This research was a quantitative research. The research material consisted on 36 ECEPs from one daycare center in Southern Finland. The children whose ECEPs I was able to use were aged between two and seven and they attended daycare in three different groups. The material was analyzed by theory-based content analysis. The descriptions of temperamental traits were given a value of one or three depending on which direction of the trait was being described. The quantified research material was analyzed via SPSS software. The statistical difference between means of gender, age and groups were analyzed by one-way variance analysis. Results. In the ECEPs activity level and adaptability were described a lot. Fairly many times were mentioned intensity of reactions, distractibility, approach and withdrawal and attention span and persistence. The threshold of responsiveness and mood got a few mentions and rhythmicity was mentioned only few times. The gender of a child doesn’t have influence in the descriptions of temperamental traits in the ECEPs. Adaptability was the only trait in which the age had influence. In the amount of descriptions age had no influence. Daycare group had influence only in the amount of descriptions of activity level.