Children`s Fears and Coping Strategies: a Comparative Perspective
Date
2007-05-29T05:54:17Z
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Abstract
The aims of the dissertation were: firstly, give a theoretical overview about fear concept,
children’s fears and coping, the role of significant others (e.g. family) and some background
factors (e.g. age, gender, SES, etc.) in children’s fears; secondly, analyse differences in preschool
children’s fears and coping strategies over the ten years by comparison of two studies (1993 and
2002); thirdly, find out the impact of children’s gender on their fears and coping strategies;
fourthly, analyse the agreement about children’s fears between two informants’(i.e. children’s and
parents’ assessments) and fifthly, analyse the impact of some background factors and parental
role in provoking children’s fears.
Overall, six hypotheses were generated on the basis of theoretical literature and previous
studies and all of them were confirmed. Fear was selected as the one of the indicators of
children’s insecurity. The sample consisted of two informants’ groups, parents and their
preschool age children who were selected randomly. We used parents’ questionnaire and
children’s interview which included three main parts (question about child’s social network,
semi-structured and picture-aided parts) as research methodology. The first study was conducted
in 1993 and was repeated in 2002.
The main findings and results are following: (1) children’s fears are different over the ten
years. The most dramatic difference proved to be the increase of imagination related fears
including the fears of television, imagined creatures and nightmares. Also the huge amount of
several self-reported fears is noteworthy; (2) social fears and fears of bodily injury have been
expressed by preschool children at quite a high level, particularly in picture-aided interview. Both
of these fear categories have been thought to first appear mainly in school age; (3) children
reported several coping ways with fears, more in 2002 than in 1993 study. It is important to point
out the significant increase of cognitive coping ways in 2002 study, which were not mentioned in
1993 study; (4) agreement between two informants, children and parents was low which is in
concordance with several previous studies. It is clear that young children can already be good
informants for their problems/fears and should be considered as primary informants in child
research; (5) parents themselves can induce children’s fears by the use of fear as socialization
mean; (6) the unique methodology developed in our project and used in these two
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Keywords
children, fear, coping, security, comparative, lapsed, hirm, toimetulek, turvalisus, võrdlev