Poster #86 - A study on young children's awareness of the public interests：Everyone's business is my business?

• In Event: Poster Session 10

Abstract

The classroom in preschool is a place where young children participate in public affairs. In the classroom, young children have to follow the conventional social norms in their preschool classrooms and learn how to interact with others in their surroundings (Carter, 2016). Some studies examined children's learning of social norms in the classroom (e.g., Carter, 2016; Dereli, 2019; Killen & Smetana, 1999), however, there is still no clarity on how young children perceive a violation of the public interests and blow the whistle. The purposes of this study were to investigate young children’s awareness of violations of the public interest and their performance of whistleblowing behavior.

There were 70 children aged 4-6 (31 boys and 39 girls, M= 5.86 years) in this study. A "young children's whistle-blowing task" consisted of two stories about broken toys and water on the floor that were constructed to measure the children’s performance. The participants were tested individually in a quiet classroom. The experimenter told stories with colorful pictures and asked questions to check the children’s understanding and response to the story. According to children’s responses, they could be divided into four categories based on whether they perceive public interests and blow the whistle: 1. perceived public interests and blew the whistle, 2. perceived but didn’t blow the whistle, 3. didn't perceive but blew the whistle, and 4. didn't perceive and didn’t blow the whistle ". Participants in category 1 got 2 points, in Categories 2 and 3 got 1 point, and in category 4 got 0 points.

The results revealed that in the context of broken toys, 65.52% of children could perceive the public interest and blow the whistle to prevent other children from getting hurt, and 24.14% of children perceived the public interest but didn’t blow the whistle. In the context of water on the ground, 42.86% of children could perceive the public interest and blow the whistle, and 10.71% of children perceived the public interest but didn’t blow the whistle. One-way ANOVA was conducted. There was a significant difference in children's awareness of the public interests between the two contexts, F(1, 68) = 7.76, MSe = .797, p < .01. Young children have more awareness of public interests in the context of broken toys. In general, most young children could perceive public interests in the classroom and blow the whistle to prevent other children from getting hurt.

Author

• Chia-Hui Chiu, University of Taipei
  Presenting Author