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The aim of this study is to use Q methodology to explore how school staff experience the behaviours of children with Smith-Magenis Syndrome (SMS) in school and how they manage working with these children. Q methodology utilises by-person factor analysis to investigate subjectivity. Fourteen school staff of students with SMS in Norway participated and sorted 40 statements according to their own experience working with a student with SMS. Two distinct viewpoints were revealed, namely, 1) Managing challenging aggressive and self-injury behaviours in school where school staff experienced a range of challenging behaviours, especially aggressive behaviours. 2) Struggling with intense non-physical challenging behaviours in school where school staff experienced behaviours such as the students being very intense, craving attention and pushing buttons. In conclusion, there must be a greater emphasis on education and advising and supporting school staff’s work with the non-physical challenging behaviours aspects of teaching children with SMS, as well as a continued focus on challenging aggressive behaviours.

This study explores how various aspects of language competence are related to social focus among preschoolers. The study presented is based on video‐recorded observation of 64 children, aged 11–61 months, during free play at their kindergarten. A measure of social focus in the preschool, regarded as an indicator of social status, was constructed based on the amount of positive and neutral contacts children received from their peers. The majority of the children were relatively seldom focused on by the others. From the transcription of the utterances, three measures of language competence were derived: a score to reflect the child’s pragmatic skills, a score to reflect the range of categories the children have available in their characterisations of the world, and a score of mean length of utterance. All measures of language competence predicted social status when in combination with age. However, only the measure of pragmatic skills had an independent contribution to social focus when the variance of age ...

The principal aim of this paper is to contribute to the pursuit of evaluating pragmatic language competence in preschool years by observation‐based data. Initially, the relations between age and language development measured as mean length of utterance (MLU) and three dialogue skills are described. The occurrences of ‘focus on the dialogue partner’ and ‘comprehensible speech’ show a uniform increase over age groups and are positively correlated with both age and MLU. Talking about events and objects outside the present situation is not related to age, and only moderately correlated with MLU. When only the explicit outside references are included, a clear developmental trend appears. The ‘Dialogue score’ thus only includes explicit outside references. The ‘Dialogue score’ comprising the three components: ‘Focus of attention’, ‘Comprehensible speech’, and ‘Reference of speech’, is constructed and its association to age and MLU is investigated. The ‘Dialogue score’ is related to formal language development w...

This study is based on video‐recorded observations of 64 children during free play at their nursery. A measure of social focus in the preschool, regarded as an indicator of social status, was constructed from the amount of positive and neutral contacts children received from their peers. Only six children often received positive or neutral contacts from their peers. The majority of the children were relatively seldom focused on by the others. A total of 16 contact categories were observed which reflected the content, manner and social function of the contacts. Twelve of the contact categories were significantly correlated with social focus. A contact score was constructed based on the child–child contacts that were significantly correlated with social focus. The contact score predicted to a large extent social status assigned to the child by other children, sharing about 60% variance with social focus. Age did not have a significant independent contribution to the prediction of social focus, when the cont...

In this study, we showed that it is feasible to employ observational methods in description of social status; thereby allowing inclusion of children with insufficient cognitive ability to make valid judgement of social role, and evading the validity issues concerning teacher and parent report. We observed presence on social arenas and social interactions in 64 children, aged 11–61 months, during free play at their kindergarten. Activity, Centrality and Focus were used to construct a three‐dimensional, observation‐based sociogram. Results indicated that below two years of age, children gather in larger groups on social arenas, but they tend to be socially passive and are rarely addressed by other children. Older children tend to be together in smaller groups, are socially more active and are more focused upon by other children. In general, only few children are granted much positive focus from their peers in the pre‐school.