Feeling safe playing on the school playground: An autism perspective

Recess in the schoolyard provides a great opportunity for physical exercise and building social engagement. Children with autism are often seen as having difficulties with social interactions, friendships and loneliness. There is little research exploring if children with autism feel safer in the presence of certain playground structures, and if they would spend more time interacting socially when they feel safer in the schoolyard. In this thesis, we examined i) the relationship between playground areas with distinct features and how safe autistic children feel there, additionally to how much time children spend in that location, and ii) the relationship between the safety ratings and the time autistic children spent in social interactions in each location. We measured 61 autistic children from one special education primary school in the Netherlands. We measured how safe children feel in four locations of the playground with a self-report questionnaire. The time spent in a location...Show moreRecess in the schoolyard provides a great opportunity for physical exercise and building social engagement. Children with autism are often seen as having difficulties with social interactions, friendships and loneliness. There is little research exploring if children with autism feel safer in the presence of certain playground structures, and if they would spend more time interacting socially when they feel safer in the schoolyard. In this thesis, we examined i) the relationship between playground areas with distinct features and how safe autistic children feel there, additionally to how much time children spend in that location, and ii) the relationship between the safety ratings and the time autistic children spent in social interactions in each location. We measured 61 autistic children from one special education primary school in the Netherlands. We measured how safe children feel in four locations of the playground with a self-report questionnaire. The time spent in a location was measured with a GPS logger on a belt the children wore. On this belt was also an RFID proximity-sensing tag, to measure how much time children spent in social interactions. The data showed statistical differences in the ratings of how safe a child feels between locations with different autism-friendly playground features, as the location with ballgame area rated lower than the location with wooden floating steps (Z=-2.839, p=0.005). We additionally found two contradictory relationships between how much time was spent in interaction between the four playground locations and the rated safety (r2(34)=-0.35, p2=0.035, r2=0.12; r4(34)= 0.45, p4=0.007, r2=0.20). In an explorative search we did find the ballgame area and the climbing structure to give more noise-complaints (F(1.00, 60.00) = 5.49, p=0.022, ηp2=0.084) and more crowdedness issues stemming from the climbing structure (F(3, 180)= 6.65, p<0.001, ηp2=0.100). We did not find a correlation between how rated safety of an area and how much time a child spends in interaction in any of the locations. Further research could explore playgrounds with more structures offering varied activities and solutions for solving crowdedness or noise complaints from larger play structures, or the effect of additional diagnoses (e.g. ADHD) or gender on play.Show less

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Feeling safe playing on the school playground: An autism perspective