Tekijät

• UNICEF Finland

Asiasanat

bullying, friends, hobbies, leisure time activities, play, primary schools, schoolchildren

Sisällön kuvaus

The study investigated the views of Finnish sixth graders in primary education on play, school, hobbies and leisure time.

First, the respondents were asked questions relating to play. These covered whether they thought all children have the right to play, whether all children have the right to play according to the law, the school grade on which children stop playing, whether childhood play ends too soon and their own reasons for not playing any more. The second set of questions focused on school and recess time. The respondents were asked whether there were general rules and rules against teasing in their school, whether the school playground was big enough, how many friends they had in school and whether they liked gym class (physical education). Those who answered that they rarely or never liked gym class were asked what the reason was (e.g. the classes are too competitive, the gym teacher does not treat all students equally). The respondents were presented with some statements relating to recess time (e.g. "they tease me during recess") and were asked how often the things described in the statements occurred in their school.

The third set of questions surveyed the respondents' free time. Views were probed on how the respondents spent their free time (what they did most often and second most often), whether there were enough places to play and hang out in their surroundings, whether they had enough friends and how often they saw their friends in their free time.

The final section investigated supervised activities and hobbies. Those who had never taken part in any supervised activity were asked the reasons for this ("my family has no money for hobbies" etc.). Those who had taken part in supervised activities, but no longer did were asked why they had quit (e.g. "my hobby was too expensive", "I was teased because of my hobby"). Those who took part in supervised activities at the moment of survey were asked how often they took part in such activities, whether they had too many, too few or the right number of hobbies and which hobbies were the most important and second most important to them. Finally, those with a supervised hobby were asked to select a statement best describing their most important and second most important hobbies each (e.g. "my hobby is too demanding", "I enjoy my hobby very much").

For background variables, the respondents were asked their gender, whether their parent(s) had an academic degree, whether they suffered from a permanent, visible handicap or injury (and what this illness had an effect on), whether there was something in their appearance that disturbed them and that others noticed, how they saw themselves and what their ethnic background was.