This research aims to study conflict conditions occurred during social plays of young children and their coping methods as well as to observe how the social plays are changing after the conflict through a qualitative research method. Research question...
This research aims to study conflict conditions occurred during social plays of young children and their coping methods as well as to observe how the social plays are changing after the conflict through a qualitative research method. Research questions following the research purpose are as follows.
1. What kind of conflicts appear when young children have social plays?
2. How young children cope with conflict conditions occurred during the social plays?
3. What changes appear in the social plays after the conflict?
This research set the objects in 20 young children in the Cloud class, a mixed class of young children aged 4 and 5 in Pureun Kindergarten affiliated with A University in H district, Seoul. Data collection for the research was done between August 10th and October 5th in 2012. Data are collected from methods such as 26 times of participation observation, informal interviews with young children and audio records. Collected data are analysed by encoding and categorizing as suggested by Bogdan and Biklen(2006).
Outcomes of the research is as follows.
First, conflict occurrence conditions during social plays have occurred within a group of the social play or while joining into the social play groups. Young children showed conflicts when there are damages in the playing materials or toys, possession disputes in the role or toys and failure in agreement for play rules while having social plays in a group. Also conflict occurred when new young child faces difficulty in joining in the play group. To be specific, they showed conflicts when refusing new children directly to join the group or not counting them to the play in spite of acceptance to play together.
Second, conflict management methods for the conflicts occurred during the social play have appeared as in solving through the third person, solving through conversation and controlling the other party with threats, escaping from the conflict condition. When it was difficult to solve the conflicts by themselves or when they want to solve the conflict quickly, young children requested help from the teacher. Also there are cases when their mates who are not participating in the play help to solve the conflicts. In addition, children in order to adjust conflict conditions to the their desired directions, young children used their own power or teacher's authority to control the other child. they showed features such as yielding to the other party in order to prevent making bigger conflicts, apologizing for the wrong part immediately or using humors to overcome the conflict conditions. Lastly, In regards to the conflict conditions occurred during the social plays, young children also tried to solve together by negotiating through mutual conversation in order to obtain results that satisfies all.
Third, when examining changes in the social play of the young children after coping with conflicts, it showed a feature that social plays become activated while contents of the children's play become abundant and delicate if they agreed with fundamental conflict management. In contrast, when the conflict is solved superficially, young children showed negative emotion while inducing another conflict or leave from the play group in order to get himself together for the uncomfortable emotion and these weakened social plays. Furthermore, when the conflicts occurred during the social plays were not solved, young children's social plays were stopped and dissipated.