Browsing by Subject "pääomat"

Parents are to an increasing extent guiding their children to take part in organized leisure time activities. The volunteers who usually steer the activity groups are the parents of the children involved. The parents generally finish their work as volunteers at the same time with their children. However, few of them continue working as volunteers in the same organization. In this thesis I examine this kind of parents by interpreting their talk around the topic. The main concepts of this study are Commitment and the Forms of capital. The commitment is essential for the continuity of the volunteer work. The reason to use the forms of capital concept is that it is a crucial prerequisite for a person to possess in order to be able to work as a volunteer. The aim of this study is to find the reasons behind the commitment of long term duration. It is important for voluntary organizations to identify the reasons since they lose valuable knowledge and experience with the individuals leaving the organization. The target group of the study consisted of 11 parents. All of them had started as volunteers at the same time with their children and continued even after their own children gave up the leisure activity. The data consisted of interviews and it was analyzed using a qualitative content analysis method. Two main categories were formed on the grounds of an analysis: the first one consisting of individual based and the other collective based reasons to work as a volunteer. Commitment was defined as a uniting high level category. The most significant factor to explain the commitment was the relationships among adults and children in the organization. The social capital of volunteers increased because of these relationships. Out of the individual based reasons the most significant one was considering the volunteer work as a way of life. Volunteers were able to find time and prioritize the work because they found it meaningful for themselves and were committed to it. The challenge to find the time for the work was significant and the lack of it limited the participation. This was defined as a category of its own. The other challenge was a tension between the different roles of a volunteer. The need to balance between the roles of a parent and a volunteer was decreased after the children of their own had given up the leisure time activity. The other reasons to continue as a volunteer, according to the data, were competence development, emotional reasons, social and community based reasons and willingness to contribute to the development of the organization they worked for.

The first goal of this thesis was to study the differences in the attitudes towards schoolification of early childhood education among the parents using early childhood education services. The second goal was to study the association between the attitudes towards schoolification of early childhood education and the intention to apply for weighted-curriculum education. Based on Bourdieu’s theory, the hypothesis of this study was that parents’ choices regarding their children’s education differ according to their social status and educational background. There is no set of indicators for schoolification of early childhood education, thus, in this study, Seppänen’s et al. (2015) attitude indicator for parents of primary school aged children is applied. The principal components of this attitude indicator were instrumental value of education, paying attention to individual tendencies, inclusion and wellbeing. The study was conducted in collaboration with the city of Hyvinkää. The questionnaire was sent to customers of early childhood education services in Hyvinkää, and 60 parents responded to it. According to the hypothesis highly educated parents and parents with high socioeconomic status consider instrumental value of education and consideration of individual tendencies more important in their children’s early childhood education than other aspects. Similarly, less educated parents and parents with lower socioeconomic status were expected to value inclusion and wellbeing over other aspects. In this study, in contrast to the theoretical background, highly educated parents were found to value inclusion more than other parents did. Similarly, on contrary to the assumptions made on the basis of theory, the consideration of individual tendencies in early childhood education was valued the least by highly educated parents. Mothers were also found to appreciate the consideration of individual tendencies more than fathers. In this study it was also discovered that there was an association between instrumental value of education and emphasis on applying to the weighted-curriculum education.