Article

The Correlation between Children\'s Playfulness and Their Social Competence(Cluster Analysis)

Author

조미정,최태산

Information

pp. 37~51 / 2011 Vol.18 No.3

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to identify any correlations between children\'s playfulness and their socialcompetence. The subjects of this study were 683 elementary school students - from the 3rd grade to the6th grade - living in the Gwangju and Jeollanam-do regions. The instruments used in this study were thechildren\'s playfulness scale(Tae San Choi, Myung Seon Choi & Mee Jung Cho, 2008) and the socialcompetence scale(Mi Hyun Han, 2005). The research data was analyzed by means of cluster analysis thiswas done in order to verify the type of playfulnes and one way ANOVA was conducted in order todetermine the differences in social competence. As a result of our classification of all the children by thecriteria of six playfulness subvariables, four types seemed to emerge. They are as follows: the lowplayfulness type, the independent pursuit of fun playfulness type, the relationship-oriented playfulness typeand the high playfulness type. Generally, the high playfulness type exhibited the best social competencefollowed by the relationship-oriented playfulness type, the independent pursuit of fun playfulness type, andthe low playfulness type. Both the high playfulness type and the relationship-oriented playfulness typeexhibited the best social participation.

Keywords