Browsing by Author "Mielonen, Riikka"

It’s been said that dog is human’s best friend. Dog loves unconditionally, comforts during moments of grief and accepts the person the way he is. It seems certain that dog has a positive impact on human. The previous research on the subject has proved that dogs can positively affect on human’s well-being and health, although the previous research has mainly focused on adult’s point of view. Inspired by my own dog Topi and my future profession I became interested in if dogs can affect on the development of children with special needs. The objective of this research is to gain information of domestic dog’s positive impacts on the social and psychological development of children with special needs. Although there is not a lot of earlier research on the subject, I believe that dog has a capability to support children’s development in many ways. This research was done as qualitative and quantitative research. The basic structure of the research is qualitative but its material was analysed also in quantitative terms. The material of the research was gathered with a query that was shared to four different Facebook groups dealing with the subject of children with special needs. 13 parents of children with special needs were participated in this query. The children had diagnosis such as ADHD, Autism, As-perger’s syndrome or some indeterminate developmental disability. The material of this re-search were analysed with quantitative content analysis. The result of this research established that domestic dogs have a positive impact on both the social and psychological development of children with special needs. Especially parents thought that dogs had affected positively on children’s empathy skills and emotion skills. In addition, dogs were seen to strengthen children’s self-esteem and self-regulation and also easing the stress and anxiety of children. Also dog’s presence had improved the concentra-tion of children. Based on the results of this research increasing Dog-Assisted Pedagogy in kindergartens would have positive effects. Extra research with a bigger sample group is needed to achieve a trustworthy research knowledge.