Abstract:

The role of kindergarten-level education is of great importance in developing attitudes and habits towards health in children (De Blasio et al., 2022). Building the foundation of young children’s health competencies can only be successful if they are provided up-to-date, age-appropriate knowledge and skills on the topic of health and illness (Bánfai-Csonka et al., 2022). The exploration of children’s associations and conceptual network in relation to health and illness can bring us closer to understanding their concept of health.

The goal of our cross-sectional, exploratory study is to map preschool children’s (n = 288) conceptual network regarding health using the word association method with the cue word “health”. Our research questions were focused on the amount and complexity of children’s associations on the theme of health, as well as the conceptual elements of their understanding of health and which health–illness model they represent. Content analysis and linguistic analysis were both used on the associations.

Based on the cue word “health”, the word-, phrase- and sentence-level answers of the children contained 814 lexemes, of which almost 40% were nouns (321) – this corresponds to the typical noun-dominance of the age group (Neuberger, 2008) – another 30% were verbs. Out of the 128 instances of adjectives, 56 were the word “healthy”; 46 of the 50 times numerals were used, the answer contained the phrase “a lot” or “many”. Older children used significantly more adjectives (F = 4.208; p = .018) and numerals (F = 4.292; p = .020), which represents a higher level of language development.

Content analysis showed a predominance of the biological aspect of health; themes of physical health promotion (fruits and vegetables) were common in the associations. Social and mental aspects of health were less prevalent. The overwhelming majority of the somatic aspect of health infers that the children’s health concept is best represented by the pathogenic branch of the biomedical model, which defines health as the absence of illness. This is echoed by the common association of ”I am not ill”, and the presence of words and phrases representing symptoms of illnesses.

Our results suggest that the adults surrounding the children (parents, teachers) also think of health in the framework of the biomedical model, and explain it to children in terms of healthy nutrients and the lack of illness.

The results of the word association test administered to preschool children call attention to the importance of increasing awareness for up-to-date health concepts among educators and parents alike, as the patterns and attitudes they convey to children greatly influence the next generations’ thoughts about health and thus, their decisions concerning their health in the long term.

Acknowledgement:
This study was funded by the Scientific Foundations of Education Research Program of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (grant number: SZKF-10/2021).

Keywords:

Word association test, health, preschool children, conceptual network.