Browsing by Subject "sosiaalinen tuki työyhteisössä"

The purpose of this article-based master's thesis is to provide more information on the interaction mechanisms between early childhood education and care staff’s experienced social support, stress, educational background and 3-6 years old children’s self-regulation challenges. Previous studies show that staff’s high stress can be associated with self-regulation challenges in children. Social support, on the other hand, is known to buffer stress at workplace. According to previous studies, the early childhood education and care staff’s educational background is also important for the quality of interaction in child groups, especially in stressful situations. A key hypothesis of the study was that the amount of social support received by the early education team members and team’s educational background affect their experience of stress and that has an effect to self-regulation challenges in child groups. The study’s quantitative data were collected in autumn 2017 by DAGIS research project. A total of 83 early childhood education and care teams (202 staff members) and 702 children from two municipalities in southern Finland participated in the study. Research hypothesis was tested with meditation analysis. In the research design, the social support from the su-pervisor and colleagues experienced by the early childhood education team, as well as the team's educational background, were defined as predictors, and the team’s perceived stress was defined as the mediator, which was expected to mediate the effect between children's self-regulation challenges and predictors. The results showed that the team’s experienced stress mediated associations from the social support predictors to the self-regulation challenges in children. On the other hand, the team's educational background had no direct or stress-related indirect association to the self-regulation challenges in children. Greater social support from the supervisor and colleagues was associated with less stress. Staff’s stronger stress, on the other hand, was associated with the greater self-regulation challenges among children. Based on the results, it would be justified to invest in the well-being of early childhood education and care staff as part of the pedagogical quality assessment and pay attention to the preconditions of sensitive human resource management. Further research is also needed, for example, how daycare units’ managers’ workload and stress affect to the interaction and pedagogical quality in child groups. The article " Early childhood education and care staff’s social support, stress and educational background and their associations to 3-6 years old children’s self-regulation challenges " is to be published in the Journal of Early Education Research.