Children’s perspective on fears connected to school transition and intended coping strategies

Abstract

The transition from primary to secondary school comes with major changes in the lives of children. There is a shortage of in-depth analyses of young people’s perspectives concerning their fears and strategies to address these. This qualitative study aims to gain first-hand understanding of children’s fears and the intended coping strategies used during school transition. Data from 52 workshops were analysed, with a total of 896 students (M age = 10.40, SD = .839) in lower Austria. First, in the classroom setting, a vignette story about a child facing fears about school transition from primary to secondary school was developed with pupils in a brainstorming session. This was followed by self-selected small group discussions, where pupils proposed strategies to help cope with these fears. A thematic analysis was carried out. Major thematic clusters distinguished between four types of fears: peer victimisation, being alone, victimisation by authority figures, and academic failure. Three additional thematic clusters described strategies for countering the fears: enacting supportive networks, personal emotion regulation, and controlling behaviour. In addition to these connected clusters, two further themes were identified: strategy outcomes and consequences, i.e., personal experiences with using specific strategies, and the discussion of participants about contradictions and questionable usefulness of identified strategy outcomes. In conclusion, the children in our study reported more social fears as compared to academic fears. Children seem reasonably competent at naming and identifying strategies; however, maladaptive strategies, as well as controversies within the described strategies may indicate a lack of certainty and competence at engaging with these strategies on a practical level.

Engaging Children in Intervention Development – A Comparison of Four Qualitative Methods and Their Suitability to Elicit Information Relevant for Early Intervention Development

“…The data are available on the open science framework platform OSF at https://osf.io/avtw2/. While this paper will focus on research methods and discuss information categories, three separate reflexive thematic analyses or content analyses were conducted to analyse the data regarding (a) peer relationships (Krammer et al, 2023), (b) school transition (Stiehl et al, 2023) and (c) children's use of online devices (Mittmann et al, 2022).…”

“…The themes (C1) "general behaviours", (C2) "activities", and (C3) "identity factors" were generated from almost all methods. This illustrates that children of this age group are very focused on basic behavioural strategies (Stiehl et al, 2023). The use of cognitive regulation strategies is only fully developed between the ages of 9-11 (Pons et al, 2004) and metacognitive abilities to plan, execute, and reflect on strategies develop between the age of 8 and 10 (Veenman et al, 2004).…”