Browsing by Subject "Covid-19"

This study reviews the everyday life of special needs families during the Covid-19-pandemic. In special needs families at least one child has an increased need for services for their health, growth and/or development. Previous studies show that these services are an important resource and help in everyday life, as it is often built around taking care of the child. In previous studies special needs families have mainly been reviewed during normal conditions and the more recent studies conducted during the pandemic emphasize the perspective of authorities. The purpose of this study is to highlight the everyday life of special needs families during the Covid-19-pandemic and how services have been organized. This study applies qualitative methodology. The data was collected by semi-structured interviews. Seven mothers of special needs families took part in the interviews. The families were from across Finland. The family structures, children’s diagnoses and available resources varied within these families. Tran scripted data was analyzed with content analysis. The study shows that the everyday life of the families focused at home during the Covid-19-pandemic, which led to everyday life routines, free time and use of money changing. During the pandemic the families had to quickly rebuild their everyday life and its routines. Everyday life became more restricted as the routines focused at home. Parents' free time decreased as the children did not attend school or free-time activities. The meaning of home and its surroundings were highlighted because families were not able to spend their time together in shopping centers or restaurants. It became apparent that the realization of services varied between the families during the Covid-19-pandemic. During the pandemic the services were no longer considered safe due to the increased risk of infection, which led to some of the services coming to a halt and the implementation of special arrangements to other services. The decision of realization of the services was partly held by the service providers, while in some cases the families made the decision themselves to pause the service. The need for help in the families did not decrease and especially mothers had to answer this with their own work input. The families found the service system to be rigid and hoped for more flexibility from their service providers. That would mean considering the wishes of the family and the focusing on the best interest of the child.

The aim of this study is to examine parents' beliefs on what impact Covid-19 has had on our young children's physical activity. With the term young children, I refer to children aged from one to six years old. The research questions for this study are the following: 1. How do parents view the impact Covid-19 has had on children's physical activity? 2. What kind of change in the child’s physical activity can be seen? 3. Is there a change in the child’s attitude towards physical activity? In the chapter physical activity some background on how children master physical movements will be presented. The chapter contains children’s physical development, as well as benefits and the needs for physical activity. Physical development and physical activity go hand in hand, developing physically often leads to the child becoming more physically active. In the chapter Covid-19 and everyday life, viewpoints on how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected young children’s everyday life and especially physical activity are examined. The Covid-19 pandemic led to activities organized for families with children, such as story-time in library, music-play at the library/church and family café etc. stopped to decrease the spreading of the Covid-19 virus. A short complete lockdown took place in the beginning of spring 2020, where early childhood centers closed, and only parents/guardians who could not stay at home with their children had the right to bring their child to early childhood education. The parents that had the opportunity to stay home with their child were offered online early childhood education via the early childhood education center that they normally attend to. How much activities were sent out depended on the early childhood centers approach and beliefs (Hilppö, et al. 2020; Nurhonen et al. 2021). However, it was decided later that early childhood education centers remained open during the pandemic, and children were offered everyday life as normal as possible. Even though, early childhood education centers opened, the Covid-19 restrictions still existed (Nurhonen et al. 2021). How these restrictions were followed depended on the family. With the use of questionnaire, that were sent out to early childhood education centers and parent-child activities I have tried to get a view on how parents view the impact Covid-19 has had on young children’s physical activity. Has the pandemic affected young children’s physical activity? What are the parents’ beliefs? and how well with Covid-19 going on can children be physically active? I collected 103 answers from the questionnaire. Looking at the collected data I have also tried to see how and what attitudes towards physical activity children have. Do they enjoy being outdoors, physically active and has this changed during the pandemic? What can be concluded from this study is that even though the Covid-19 pandemic has been going on for 2 years it has not, according to the parents of the children, affected young children's physical activity that markedly. The children of this study seem to be as physically active as before the Covid-19 pandemic. This study is only a sample of a specific number of people, trying to explain how Covid-19 has affected the daily lives of children. Further study is needed to fully understand the changes made by Covid-19.

The year 2020 changed our everyday life. The exceptional circumstances with Covid-19 have suddenly affected people’s everyday life. The purpose of this study is to observe how meal box service can help everyday cooking habits during the exceptional situation. Meal box service consists of food items, premeasured, and accompanied by a set of recipes. Meal box are mostly delivered home, or you can pick it up from special store. This study analyses what consumers appreciate when using meal box service and how it helps everyday life. People who took part in this study have used the meal box service during corona situation between autumn 2020 and spring 2021, when everyday life felt normal again after the crisis-like nature during spring 2020. This research applies qualitative methodology. The data were collected by using the theme interview method with both face to face and remote access. The interviews were made during February and March 2021. Nine adults took part in the interview, age range 26–56 years. All interviews were living in one- or two-people’s households without children. The interview records were analyzed using qualitive content analysis. The results of this analysis can be divided into three main categories as following, everyday life routines, services during the exceptional situation and change of everyday life. The results of this study show that meal box service helps everyday life by saving time from grocery shopping and meal planning and giving more time to do some other tasks. Covid-19 situation shows that people wanted to support companies by using meal box service. During the exceptional situation people have spent more time at home, which increased the need to prepare more food at home. This is one of the reasons people wanted to choose meal box service. Meal box service helps by diversifying eating habits and lowers the need to do grocery shopping. Other positive effects were discovering new recipes and ingredients. Difficulties using the service were that it didn’t remove the need for grocery shopping altogether. Special diets where also founded to be quite challenging when using meal box service because it didn’t take all diets inconsideration. Some people thought that weekly subscription was too captivating, because they didn’t want to use the service every week.

Objectives. At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, a large part of teaching in higher education institutions was transferred to distance learning, which affected the lives of students in many ways. The aim of this study was to examine what kind of challenges Finnish university students experienced in their studies during the Covid-19 pandemic and distance learning in the fall of 2020. The connections of the perceived challenges to gender and to the start date of studies were also examined. This study aimed to form a deeper understanding of what kind of demands the Covid-19 pandemic caused for university students. Based on the demands, it was discussed what kind of resources students would need to support their studies and well-being. In this study the study demands-resources model was used as theoretical framework. Methods. The research data was gathered as a part of the research of the educational psychology research unit of the Faculty of Education, University of Helsinki. The sample consisted of university students (N=1264) aged 18–58, of whom 81% were women. The measures of the study were based on an open question regarding the challenges experienced by students in their studies. The data was analyzed by classifying the challenges appearing in the answers using qualitative methods. The connections of the perceived challenges to gender and to the start date of studies were also examined using cross-tabulation. The significance of the observed differences was tested with the χ² test. Results and conclusions. Thirteen different categories of challenges were identified from the data, which described different physical, social, emotional and cognitive challenges experienced by the students. The most common challenges reported by students were related to high workload, time management and organizational skills, as well as lack of social interaction and loneliness. The results showed differences in the perceived challenges according to the start date of the studies. The results also suggested gender differences, but these differences were not statistically significant. Based on the results, students would need social support which the university could provide, for example by enabling social integration, especially at the beginning of studies. In addition, students would need support for developing time management and organizational skills, as well as physical support, for example in the form of providing facilities suitable for studying.