It was not officially possible to leave the cadastral territory for recreational purposes in Czechia during the period from the 1 March to the 21 March 2021. The aim of this study was to evaluate how this lockdown affected the amount of time young people spent outdoors and their health and mental well-being. Our research was aimed at students at all levels of school. Immediately after the end of the strictest phase of the lockdown, we conducted a questionnaire survey and collected data from more than a thousand students at elementary schools, secondary schools and universities, as well as 160 parents of 269 pre-school and primary school children. The answers to the close-ended questions were evaluated by statistical analysis, while the answers to the open-ended questions were evaluated using thematic analysis. The results show that the impact of restrictive measures on the health and psyche of young people was significant, especially for female students. Lockdown significantly reduced respondents’ opportunities to spend time outdoors. Male students spent significantly more of their free time in front of computer screens. Respondents living in buildings without a garden and young people who could not use a recreational building outside the district of residence were most affected by restrictions during the lockdown.
Local landscape is a part of the real world that surrounds a person from an early childhood. It offers opportunities for their cognitive development, stimuli for emotional development, shapes their views. A positive relationship with the local region should be developed in Geography education as one of the affective educational goals. The aim of this paper is to evaluate pupils' perception of the concept of a local region and to find out their relationship to their local region based on the results of a questionnaire survey of pupils of lower secondary education in the Czechia and Slovakia. The data were collected using an online questionnaire, which was completed by 4 673 pupils in the Czechia and 3 980 pupils in Slovakia. The results show that pupils perceive their local region most often as the whole district or the whole region in which they live. Pupils' attitude to the local region decreases with their age and was stronger among boys. Slovak pupils identify with their region more and there are significant differences in their relationship to the region across regions. In particular, pupils are most proud of the natural environment and cultural monuments. The findings are beneficial in the field of regional identity research, but also in educational settings, as the local region and a deeper knowledge of it is not only the goal, but also the means of Geographic education.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.