Browsing by Author "Nyman, Anna"

The aim of this study was to survey whether early childhood education professionals (early childhood childcare workers, teachers, special education teachers and social workers) use playfulness in their work, how they assess their own well-being at work and how playfulness is connected to their well-being at work, and whether there are differences in responses between professional groups. In addition, I wanted to find out how playfulness and well-being at work are connected. Play and playfulness are often associated with children, so there has been less research on adults. However, play and playfulness are both important part of the working day of early childhood education professionals, and the pedagogy used in early childhood educa-tion is largely based on these. Playfulness in adults has been found to be connected to various aspects of life, such as sociability and stress tolerance. Proyer's (2015) structural model of playfulness is used as the background theory of playfulness. In the field of early childhood education, well-being at work has previously been studied mainly from the perspective of early childhood education teachers, so in this study I wanted to examine other professional groups as well. Well-being at work was examined by Aho's (2011) survival path and Kangas and colleagues’ (2022) research. Although there has been little research into the playfulness and well-being at work of people working in early childhood education, a connection has been found between these two phenomena. The purpose of this quantitative study was to analyze the data collected with an electronic questionnaire using the SPSS 28 Statistics program. For the survey, the sub-areas of playfulness (other-directed, lighthearted, intellectual-creative, and whimsical playfulness) and the sub-areas of well-being at work (self-development, community spirit of the work community, holistic outlook on life and external support, and meaningfulness of work) that emerged from the theory base were operationalized into measurable variables. Variables measuring different sub-areas were combined into sum variables. The research started in the original research community was continued due to the low response rate in four early childhood education-related groups on social media. The survey received 166 responses from three professional groups: early childhood childcare workers, teachers, and special education teachers. Differences between professional groups were examined using the Kruskal-Wallis test and the connection between playfulness and well-being at work using Spearman's rank order correlation. According to the study, early childhood education professionals use playfulness in their work quite well (mean 3.94). According to the results, all aspects of playfulness are used, some more than others. Statistically significant differences were found between professional groups, especially in the whimsical playfulness. According to this study, the well-being at work experi-enced by early childhood education professionals is moderate (mean 3.61), with the community spirit of the work community supporting well-being at work the most. However, there was no statistically significant difference between professional groups in the variables of well-being at work. As could be assumed from previous studies, a statistically highly significant connection was found between playfulness and well-being at work