Research project Borderland: integrity in preschool children's everyday lives
The thesis aims to examine how integrity can be understood based on children’s everyday lives in preschool; what can children’s integrity mean when based on the boundaries that children themselves express? In what ways is integrity important for children?
The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork at a preschool with children aged 1-6 years, their preschool teachers and parents. With support from a social psychological understanding and concepts from privacy theory, children's (individual and collective) social boundary-drawing processes are examined. It concerns the ways in which children make themselves (un)available to their surroundings, how they create closeness and distance, and what they share and keep to themselves.
Things that engage the children and that constitute the results of the study are questions about homesickness, managing personal belongings, being able to commute between closeness and distance, and choosing how they appear to others. The thesis has a critical approach in that, based on what is important to the children, it problematizes the conditions for children's integrity in relation to the preschool's mission, institutional structure and social ideals.
The thesis project is supervised by Åsa Bartholdsson, Anna Åhlund and Anne-Li Lindgren.