The purpose of this study is to have new and better insight and help further a deeper understanding about conflict situations between children by looking into how children express and understand conflict situations through observation of conflict situ...
The purpose of this study is to have new and better insight and help further a deeper understanding about conflict situations between children by looking into how children express and understand conflict situations through observation of conflict situations and interviews with children in class circumstances. According to this, premise, the main points that this study will focus on are the following:
1. What are the characteristics of affirming and denying actions in children conflict situations, according to age group.
2. What are the tendencies and characteristics of children’s' memory of conflict according to age groups?
3. What are the tendencies and characteristics of children's explanations about affirmed actions according to age group?
4. What are children's general recognition about conflict and the characteristics of conflict, according to age group?
This subjects for this study were 2 classes of 4-year-old students, and 2 classes of 5-year-old students from a kindergarten and a nursery in Gwangju City. The total number of subjects in this study was 110, with 50 4-year-old students and 60 5-year-old students.
The questionnaire I used to interview the subjects about conflict situations consisted of 4 total parts. First, I recorded the children's affirmation and denial about 4 concrete actions in conflict situations. Second, I asked children to described the children's memories and what kind of behavior was used during conflict situations was recorded. Third, I wrote down the children's explanation about the actions which the children affirmed to and classified them according to explanation type. Finally, the fourth part recorded the children's reactions to 4 questions about how the children recognize and understand conflict. This questionnaire's composition was based on the question types which Ross (2004) used.
Chi square was used in the analysis of the subjects to verify difference of frequency.
A summary of the results of this study follows:
First, most of them affirmed about their positive actions, opponent's positive actions and opponent's negative actions. On the other hand, the rate of affirmation of their own negative actions was the lowest. And there was no differences according to age groups.
Second, in the children's narratives of their conflicts, the highest rate of inclusion was for their opponent's negative actions, followed by their own positive actions, their own negative actions and their opponent's positive actions.
As for the difference according to age, in the rate of inclusion of actions, the 5-year-old subjects was higher than 4-year-old subjects.
Third, the children were more likely to explain their positive action in terms of 'Actor's goal', their negative action in terms of 'Adversary's prior actions', in contrast to this, opponent negative action in terms of 'Actor's goal', opponent positive action in terms of 'Actor's goal' in 4-year-old subjects, 'Situation factor' in 5-year-old subjects.
According to these results, we found that the children have intention to make themselves look better through rationalization of their own actions, blaming their negative actions on the opponents' prior actions.
Finally, we can find that the children realized that the cause of the conflict was because of the opponent. Also, most of the subjects didn't seriously realize about conflict, and they want to keep the relationships inside their age group without connection to the results of conflicts.