Browsing by Subject "fyysinen vuorovaikutus"

Aims. Touch is a part normal human interaction, in school too. By touching, people show for example friendship and empathy to one another. Touch has also a lot of significant positive effects on child's development and human well-being. On the other hand, touching is associated with norms and negative feelings that emerge especially when discussing touching in school. The purpose of this master's thesis was to find out, describe and analyse what kind of touching behaviour there is in the 6th grade interaction and who are the touch initiators. Other purpose of this thesis was also to bring more positive perspective to the discussion about touching in school. Methods. The data for this master's thesis was collected by observing 6th grade's Finnish and mathematics lessons. There were 6 lessons in total and they were recorded on video. The study was a qualitative case study. The analysis was made by applying a combination of quantification and content analysis. The touches that were observed from the videos were calculated and tabulated. After that the touches were categorized and the touch situations were described in detail. Results and conclusions. The physical interaction between pupils was mainly friendly and teasing. There was not any touching behaviour that would refer to bullying or violence. Touching between girls was a little more common than touching between boys, but otherwise there was not much difference in the two genders' touching behaviour. Physical interaction between teacher and pupils was very little. When a teacher touched a pupil, the touch was either encouraging or guiding. Because of the nature of case study, the results cannot be generalized. The results, however, give a good picture of the touching behaviour in the five 6th grade lessons observed.