Abstract
Understanding children’s perspectives on how they feel at school is essential to creating school environments that best support their development. Researchers have studied the well-being of children, but young children under the age of 7 are severely underrepresented in this research. This is partly due to the lack of effective methods available to elicit young children’s perspectives. This study pilots a story completion task with young children in order to determine whether this method is an effective way to elicit children’s understanding of their subjective well-being at school. Twenty-five 4- to 6-year-old children from two kindergarten classrooms in a small, urban Canadian private school participated in this study. Despite individual differences, there were commonalities in the way young children perceived their lives at school. Results from a thematic analysis suggest that this method is effective as shown by children’s willing participation, the identification of story themes consistent with previous literature, and children’s engagement with the task.
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I would like to thank Matthew Naylor for his thoughtful illustration of the story completion task.
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Lam, L., Comay, J. Using a Story Completion Task to Elicit Young children’s Subjective Well-Being at School. Child Ind Res 13, 2225–2239 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-020-09745-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-020-09745-5