Browsing by Author "Parkkinen, Tiia"

Aims. Touch is a natural part of interpersonal interaction and it occurs universally in different cultures. Touch has mentioned to have plenty of positive effects on child’s development and well-being. This study deals with short touches, which last less than for five seconds, within adult-child interaction in 3-5-year old children’s kindergarten group. The importance of studying short touches arises through their smallness. They are widely used within adult-child interaction, but they still easily escape one’s attention and stay unnoticed. Through research and knowledge, short touches could put into operation as a pedagogical tool in order to improve positive interaction and children’s well-being. The aim of this study is to find out how much and in which situations short touches are used in kindergarten between an adult and a child, and also what kind of these short touches are by nature. Methods. The data of this study was collected by observing a wide video recording that had been shot in one kindergarten. The data had material in different age groups but this study ended up to consider a group of 3-5-year old children. The analysis methods used were both content analysis and multimodal interaction analysis. All short touches were collected from the defined data and after that, they were analysed by their nature and divided by their nature definitions to affectionate, shepherding or assisting touches. Results and conclusions. The results showed that there appears plenty of short touches between children and adults in different situations in kindergarten. Most commonly short touches were used in transition situations and the least in waiting situations. Short touches were used as an expression of affection, as a tool of bodily guidance and to assist children getting dressed or undressed in transition situations. On the grounds of results, it can be said that short touches seem to be widely used and multidimensional tool of interaction between an adult and a child in kindergarten. Due to the size of the data, the results cannot be widely generalized. But then again by way of this study and its results, we have indications that short touches are meaningful in kindergarten environment and through that, we can also widen the overall picture of adult-child interaction and things that affect it.