Profile of prosocial behaviors of institutionalized children at a school yard

Abstract

Prosocial behavior refers to actions directed to the welfare of the others and it is influenced by physical and social aspects of the environment. This study objected to investigate chiefly the occurrences of care behavior among institutionalized children. Four boys and one girl took part in this study, with ages between four and six years old, who were observed in the yard of the school. A total of ten sessions of twenty-five-minute were recorded for each focal subject, summing 250 minutes of recordings. At total, 26 behavioral events which denoted care with the others were identified and organized into the following categories: Helping, Care-taking playing, Establishing affectionate contact, and Entertaining. The results indicate that while participants are at the school yard, the most demonstrated behavior subcategory involves cooperation attitudes (Helping subcategory). The data also show that male focal subjects who were older than five years old and were at school for less than 15 months would emit more care behaviors. Concerning receivers, it was found that the girls who were studying at school, younger children and the ones who had less time in the institution received more prosocial behavior. It is expected that the results of this study may contribute to future researches while investigating prosocial behavior in educational settings, especially when they involve special populations, such as children who live in shelter institutions. Similarly, studies like this can encourage the development of (pedagogic-political and other) projects in institutions for children in order to stimulate prosocial behavior among peers. Current studies about the patterns of interaction in environments for the children (e.g., Barnett, Burns, Sanborn, Bartel, & Wilds, 2004;Carrus, Fornara, & Bonnes, 2005;Carvalho, 2000;Fernandes, 2006;Sager, Sperb, Roazzi, & Martins, 2003;Sebanc, 2003;Wolff & Fesseha, 1999) show that the social behavior of children is influenced by physical characteristics of the environment (dimension, structure and space setting) as well as social characteristics (characteristics of the subjects that attend such space). Therefore, interactions and behaviors of children have been studied, taking into consideration the influence of aspects related to the context in which these children interact with adults and groups of peers in the daily life activities.Environmental Psychology among other areas that value the influence of the institutional and family environment on the children's behavior presents today several perspectives of analysis (Carrus et al., 2005). Among them, there is the investigation centered on the understanding of the ecological context that regulates social behaviors, in an attempt to show how the physical and social characteristics of the environment have influence on the relationship between people and vice-versa. In other words, the human interactions that take place on their ecological environment may contribute for the development of the child and its peers, a perspective share...