Pour l'étude de l'adaptation
In: Enfance, Band 29, Heft 1, S. 99-132
ISSN: 1969-6981
The present work « for the study of adjustment » is a longitudinal research conducted with a population of 101 nursery-school (Ecole Maternelle) children, with a follow-up until the end of the first grade of elementary school. The results presented and discussed here are those obtained in the nursery-school.
So as to focus the research on adjustment and not on maladjustment, the methodological choices have been the following : exclude any reference to pre-established norms ; study a complete school population ; describe adjustement by resorting primarily to the manifest behaviors of each child, in usual but well differentiated school situations.
Direct observation of behaviors has been completed by indirect observation (questionnaires adressed to teachers).
In the population we have studied, a positive relation has been revealed between two dimensions of adjustment : the child's integration to his peer-group and his integration to the demands of the school institution.
The confrontation between the data obtained through direct observation and variables of a different kind (sociometrical data, evidence given by teachers, results of learnings) specify the adaptative significance of the observed behaviors and the psychological characteristic which are common to these two ways of adjustment.