Browsing by Author "Tuovila, Juulia"

The purpose of this study was firstly to find out what kinds of fears occur in the literature, what kind of characters are very fearful in the literature and how the people in the literature control their fears. Secondly the investigation concerned fears and talking about fears of primary school aged children and the effect of literature when processing fears. Reading fiction can be helpful in processing difficult things and I believe that it can also be helpful for processing fears. Previous studies have shown that among other things, children are afraid of being left alone, death, victimization, darkness and imaginary creatures. When I decided to do research from the literature that I've chosen, the assumption was that these children's most common fears will be found also in the chosen literature and from interview data. This master's thesis was a two-step research. This was a qualitative research and the methods of analysis in use were content analysis and close reading method. In this two-step research I firstly read the literature specifying passages from the text were there was fear, anxiety or controlling fear. The parts that I found in the literature material that concerned fear, I attached to the results of previous studies. In the second phase I interviewed four primary pupils. First I interviewed these children about the fears they experience. Then I read a short story to the interviewees which I had chosen with the help of the first phase of this research. After reading I interviewed the children again. In the material there were a lot of different kinds of fear, whose target variety was versatile. It seemed that the self-image is strongly linked to how fearful the characters were, and also to how strongly and even hysterically characters were afraid. Fears appeared both adult characters and child characters in the material. The characters of the book tried also to control their fears with different means. This study showed that self-image can effect on individuals fearfulness. In addition it became clear that for characters of the novels it was possible to control fears and that the book characters fears had a target. To the interviewees I chose a short story were there were most fears from one's imagination. Fears which are rising from our imagination are very common among children of the age I interviewed in this study. I found out that children have multifarious fears. For example children are afraid of darkness and imaginary creatures. Reading literature to children had a great effect on handling fears in this research. Conceptualisation can be very difficult to primary pupils. For some children conceptualisation of fear was extremely difficult, for some it was partly possible and for some it was easy.