Browsing by Author "Pekkala, Sannukka"

The aim of the study. The aim of this Bachelor’s thesis is to find out, describe and analyze what nature means for five immigrants living in the capital region of Finland. This thesis describes also their nature relation and nature-related experiences. Research on this subject is scarce and one aim of the study is to gather more information. Methods. This research is a qualitative case study research. This case study was done by interviewing five immigrants living in the capital region in spring 2016. The participants were originally from three different countries: India, Italy and Chile. The ages of the participants varied from 26 to 41 years. The data was collected by theme interviews and analyzed by using the qualitative content analysis. Main Findings. When talking about the relation to nature, the immigrants highlighted the importance of their childhood experiences as a foundation to the nature relation. Four out of five participants thought that nature was a meaningful part of their everyday life. All of the participants had mainly positive experiences in Finnish nature. An interesting finding was that moving to Finland had affected the way the participants thought about nature: they appreciated the way the nature is respected in Finland, and in some cases also wanted to teach this to their children.