It is very important to understand what it is like to go through puberty during elementary school. The aim of this study is to understand the essential meaning of elementary school students' puberty. The study used van Manen's hermeneutic phenomenolog...
It is very important to understand what it is like to go through puberty during elementary school. The aim of this study is to understand the essential meaning of elementary school students' puberty. The study used van Manen's hermeneutic phenomenological method. The study participants were a total of sixteen students in 5th and 6th grade from 3 schools in Chonbuk. The data was collected by close interviews along with participants' works such as essay, diary, and drawings of house-tree-person, and with professional artists' works concerning puberty.
A total of 10 essential meanings and 33 submeanings were emerged. The essential meanings were 「hard to recognize the arrival of pubertal period」, 「glad to aware marvelous changes in the body」, 「difficult to accept changes in the body」, 「fearful of other people' remarks on their body changes」, 「desiring to be admitted as a mature person」, 「feeling stressed and complicated」, 「pursuing to be alone and independent」, 「having a secret of their own」, 「ambivalent about the opposite sex」, 「having changes in taste on cloths, music, etc」.
In summary, experiences of puberty by the elementary schoolers in 5th and 6th grade were unique and clearly distinguishable from those by middle and high school students. Specifically, they realized the arrival of pubertal period by others; they were glad to recognize marvelous things happening in the body; they were envious of the friends who had no sign of change in the body; they feared to hear about their body changes from others; they desired to be admitted as a mature person; they wanted to hide body changes; they hated to mention names of the genital area.
This study is different from other studies on pubertal experiences because it accepted and interpreted the experiences of puberty from elementary school students, not from adolescents in general. Therefore, findings of this study could be utilized in planning educational programs and nursing interventions for elementary school students in puberty.