Browsing by Subject "well-being"

This study focuses on stress experienced by students and the effect of crafts in dealing with stress. The aim of the study is to find out what kind of stress students experience and what are the main reasons for the development of stress. The study focuses also on how making crafts in spare time has changed during studying crafts. For the study a group of Helsinki University crafts science students were interviewed. The emphasis is on students' personal, both positive and negative, experiences of stress. At the same time stress is ap-proached widely, trying to avoid dealing with the issue from only one perspective. Even though the well-being of students have been researched a lot, there are not that many studies done from the perspective of students studying to be crafts teachers. Crafts done on spare time is considered calming and stress-relieving, but what happens when the hobby turns into an occupation? Selecting the topic was affected by an interest in crafts' effect to well-being and personal experiences from the heaviness of studying at a university and the stress caused by it. Studying the stress of students is important, be-cause it enables collection of data and practical suggestions for improving teaching. The material was collected through group interviews, which were preceded by a back-ground information form. Nine crafts science students participated into the interview, and all of them told they had experienced stress. Even though the experiences were individual, the research results showed some common stress factors, such as money and time man-agement problems. Making crafts in spare time had decreased, but for almost everyone the quality had improved during studies. The results give a better perspective on student stress and the challenges related to studying and life management. The results could also be useful in developing crafts science and planning courses. The study could be expanded to apply to all crafts teacher students as well as to compare the results with all students. Further studies could find out how to improve the awareness of students about stress and its good and bad sides.

The number of divorces has increased in Finland. As a result, various non-traditional living arrangements, such as joint custody arrangements, have become more common. Previous studies suggest that the presence of both parents has a great impact on the development of a child’s identity, and that the parents’ divorce may cause anxiety and emotional trauma. The aim of this study is to map out, especially from the teacher’s point of view, what kinds of impacts parents’ divorce and joint custody have on children’s well-being. The study was carried out as a descriptive literature review. For the study, I investigated divorce- and joint custody-studies from the 2000’s and the 2010’s. I selected eight studies from that time period, of which four focused on divorce, and the other four on joint custody. For this literature review, I chose both quantitative and qualitative studies. Three points of view were selected: How do gender differences, age differences, and parental conflicts affect children’s well-being? Regardless of gender or age, children living in nuclear families had higher feeling of well-being compared to children of divorced parents. However, parental conflicts, for example battle over custody, had a great impact on children’s well-being. Especially boys seemed to benefit from joint custody, and it seemed that older children were able to cope better with the possible challenges posted by joint custody. In the case of severe parental conflict, joint custody appeared to be the less optimal living arrangement for children. Parental support was positively associated with children’s well-being in different living arrangements. Research findings about the effects of divorce and joint custody on children’s well-being can be used as a tool to help and understand children coming from different family backgrounds.