Deriving Information on Play and Playfulness of 3–5-Year-Olds from Short Written Descriptions: Analyzing the Frequency of Usage of Indicators of Playfulness and Their Associations with Maternal Playfulness

Abstract

Playfulness is an individual differences variable that enables people to (re-)frame almost any situation into an entertaining, amusing, intellectually stimulating and/or personally interesting situation by interacting playfully with others, by resolving tension, by liking complexity over simplicity and/or by having a preference for unusual topics, persons and/or activities. We asked 208 German-speaking mothers of 3–5-year-olds to describe their child in 5–10 sentences. Using a list of criteria for playfulness (e.g., actively initiating humor, playful exchange with others or widespread interests), we found that mothers used, on average, two playful characteristics to describe their child (17% did not report any). Greater usage of playful descriptors in the written texts was positively related mainly to greater other-directed and intellectual playfulness of the mothers. The findings are encouraging and suggest that the list of playful criteria in descriptions of children could be used in the study of inter-individual differences in playfulness in young children.

An Analysis of the Hebrew Translation of the OLIW-S to Assess Adult Playfulness

“…Another example would be Intellectual playfulness, which should be particularly important in work contexts (e.g., facilitating innovative behavior or finding unusual and new problem-solving strategies). Applications of the model exist for adolescents (Proyer & Tandler, 2020) and younger children (Tandler & Proyer, 2022). The standard measure for the four facets is a questionnaire, which exists in a standard form and a short form (Proyer, 2017; Proyer et al, 2020).…”