Browsing by Author "Vähävaara, Jannina"

Goals. This thesis’s purpose was to find out do kindergarten workers experience aggressive behavior from children at the kindergarten. Other goal was to find out how kindergarten workers encounter a child who is behaving aggressively. This subject has not been studied earlier, but aggressiveness has been studied a lot for example in schools for what kind of aggressiveness happens in schools. In school world there has been a study done by Hanna Hakala Master’s degree study in which she studied with same kind of questions how schoolteachers have experiences aggressiveness in schools and how they have encountered aggressively behaving child. Research questions have been developed based on different articles, which the researcher has read before writing this thesis. Purpose of this study was to find out does kindergarten workers experience aggressive behavior from children and how do they encounter a child that has been behaving aggressively. Methods. In this research, five kindergarten workers participated in the research. From the interviewees three were kindergarten teachers by their education and two where practical nurses. Interviewees worked in different kindergarten except for two worked from the same kindergarten. The interviews where done by semi-structured theme interview and they lasted from about seven to twenty minutes. After the interviews, they were transcripted and analyzed using theory-driven content analysis. Findings and conclusions. The main results were that kindergarten workers face aggressive behavior from children in kindergarten. Aggressiveness can manifest itself in any kind of situations and aggressiveness can be hitting, spitting or throwing things. When encountering aggressiveness they were advised to stay clam and to take care of everybody’s safety. From these results we can make conclusions that you have to be tranquil but also prepare for situations where a child can behave aggressively towards you. Applying the findings to practice requires a wider sampling.