Conferences

Is there anything you can tell me about people who are Catholics? Ethical and questionnaire design issues relating to the evaluation of Sesame Tree on young children’s social attitudes and awareness in Northern Ireland.

Sesame Tree – the Northern Ireland version of Sesame Street – has been produced in Northern Ireland to support the Personal Development and Mutual Understanding area of the Revised Northern Ireland Curriculum. It aims to promote a range of positive outcomes among young children including a better understanding of themselves and others, more positive relationships with others, a greater appreciation of and respect for diversity and an awareness of how to live as part of a community.

The effectiveness of the television series is being evaluated through a series of studies that will be described in this paper: The first of these was a cluster randomised controlled trial involving 20 primary schools and 440 children aged 5-6 years. The intervention consisted simply of the children in the P2 classes of these schools being shown three episodes of Sesame Tree a week for a period of 10 weeks. The second was a naturalistic study tracking children’s viewing habits (specifically in terms of their naturalistic exposure to Sesame Tree on television) and attitudes over an eight month period. 34 primary schools were selected randomly from across Northern Ireland and 697 young children (aged 5-6) took part in this second study. Their attitudes and awareness were tested at the beginning of the study period and then again at the end and three different measures of their exposure to Sesame Tree were captured at four time points.

The effectiveness of Sesame Tree was assessed in relation to four main outcomes: 1) whether it increased children’s willingness to be inclusive of others in general; 2) whether it increased children’s willingness to be inclusive of someone from a different racial background; 3) whether it increased children’s positive attitudes towards cultural activities associated with their own and other communities; 4) whether it reduced Catholic and Protestant children’s tendency to see themselves as different to one another; and 5) whether it increased children’s environmental awareness, particularly in relation to the need to recycle household waste. Multilevel modeling was used to analyse the data from both from cluster randomised controlled trial and the naturalistic study.

A third cluster randomised controlled trial involving 28 primary schools and children aged 5-6 years is ongoing. This aims to evaluate an Outreach Intervention whereby children are shown 6 episodes of Sesame Tree and then asked to engage in related school and home based activities. The effectiveness of Sesame Tree will again be assessed in relation to the four main outcomes described above and will also include a focus on children’s awareness of and understanding of emotions.

This paper will explore the practical and ethical issues of researching young children’s social attitudes and awareness, particularly in relation to assessing general willingness to be inclusive of others; attitudes towards differing cultural activities; racial attitudes and the attitudes of Catholic and Protestant children towards one another.