In March of 2020, Canada, along with the rest of the world, declared the COVID-19 pandemic a national emergency and responded with society-wide lockdowns, granting exceptions only for essential workers. Canadians across all demographic categories were significantly impacted, and many parents of children under 18 faced the difficult task of caring for their children while simultaneously meeting their work obligations. Using novel in-depth interview data from 30 Canadian parents (in 15 couples) collected between April 2022 and May 2023, I explore three main changes to family life resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic: expanded family-friendly work practices, increased time with nuclear family members, and fathers' increased contributions to childcare. My work builds on previous research in two important ways. First, it utilizes qualitative data to deepen our understanding of these early shifts; and second, it provides evidence for the durability (or lack thereof) of family changes beyond the initial lockdown stage of the pandemic and into the 'new normal.' With this approach, I find that family life changed dramatically during the pandemic and some of these changes were durable while others were not.

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The authors felt, after workning at HVB, that there was an ambiguity about how to find the correct balance in their professional role and how much personal information shoud be shared whilst building a relationship. The aim of the study is to gain an understanding of how the staff at HVB homes work to find a correct approach towards the youth and what support they receive from management. We also want to deepen our understanding of how the saff whilst building the relationships with the young people, find the balance between being professional or private. To study this, we have conducted a qualitative study where ten respondents partiecipated in semi-stuctured interviews that form the basis for this work. Results show that the support that staff receive from management is through staff meetings. There are no written guidelines and no clarification on what the terms; professional, personal and private mean. What we noticed is that the terms were not clear to the respondents, which is likely to lead to missunderstandings amongst the staff. Futhermore, the results show that the staff belives that the most inportant thing in the relationship-building work is the focus on youth treatment and being responsive to the youth's needs. The staff works actively to find the balance around how they should act in relationship building and approach it in a professional manner. Respondents talk about it being up to each one in relationship building, which is visible in the results.

This study investigated the use of storytelling in order to support children's emergent literacy in Malawi's resource deprived Community Based Childcare Centers (CBCCs). It focused on the professional development of four caregivers from four CBCCs following a Formative and Design Experiment model, and using qualitative methods of inquiry. The professional development on storytelling was designed following an informative two-week observation period. Following the observation, a daylong professional development was organized to train the caregivers. In the seven-week intervention period that followed the professional development, the main focus of the study was on the perceptions of the caregivers about their participation in a professional development on storytelling in CBCCs, their responses to using storytelling, and their perceptions about children's responses to using storytelling in CBCCs. Data that informed the study comprised caregivers' reflective notes in their journals, individual caregiver weekly interviews, weekly focus group discussions, and research reflective field notes that were collected over seven weeks after the professional development. Findings suggested that the four caregivers found the professional development beneficial to them all. However, out of the four caregivers, three of them and their respective children demonstrated benefit from storytelling, growth in knowledge and development of storytelling skills. The three caregivers reported becoming more connected with the children, understood them better, found storytelling to be a teaching approach, and felt that their teaching was made easier and enjoyable. The children taught by these three caregivers enjoyed their learning and even resourced stories from their communities. They too, became storytellers. In the end, the caregivers felt that they were ready to share their experiences with other caregivers in Zomba District in Malawi. These findings suggest that storytelling could be used in support of emergent literacy at a larger scale, as well as serve as springboard for pedagogical training of the caregivers culminating in the development of locally available teaching and learning resources in the Malawian CBCC. / Ph. D.

This qualitative thematic analysis study aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of how the work of social services with children and youths is presented on the internet forum Flashback. The debated topic of social services kidnapping children is a subject that arouses concern and fear among many families, something that can lead to families not daring to turn to social services for help. The empirically guided method resulted in seven different themes. The results indicated a clear negative portrayal of social services work with children and youths. This presentation is based on factors such as social workers low competence, arbitrariness and belief that the children in care of social services are exposed to neglect. Furthermore, it is stated that the social services lack transparency and needs to be controlled by other authorities. Despite a largely negative portrayal, some users shared positive experiences argued with educational commentary against other users. This study also intends to understand the users’ discussions about trust or distrust of the social service. The prominent emotion on the internet forum is mistrust but also ambivalence. Users express that the social work will never be good enough as social services do too much on the one hand, and too little on the other. In conclusion, this study gained an understanding of how the portrayal, together with the users ́ arguments, is the basis for trust and mistrust. I summary, the understanding of trust is an important component in the complex social work. This insight can possibly contribute to authorities and social workers being able to discover strategies of how individuals trust in social work can increase.

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The purpose of this research was to investigate how adults identify music behaviors of young children in play-based early childhood settings. The research questions were (1) Are there statistically significant effects of training, parental status, or direction condition on the number of individual musical acts identified by adults? (2) How does response latency vary based on training, parental status, and direction condition? (3) Of the music acts identified by the subjects, what types of music acts are identified as consensus acts (those identified by 75% of subjects or more within any three-second window)? and, (4) How do consensus acts differ with regard to type, frequency, and difficulty? Seventy-two adults (24 child development teachers, 24 early childhood music teachers, and 24 musicians) participated in the study. Of the 24 subjects in each group, half were parents, and half were nonparents. Subjects were randomly assigned equally to two direction conditions: Meaningful Direction Condition and Intentional Direction Condition. Subjects watched video of young children (five to fifteen months old) and adults interacting musically in a play-based early childhood setting. Subjects in the Meaningful Direction Condition pressed the space bar on a computer when they thought any child in the video demonstrated a meaningfully musical behavior; subjects in the Intentional Direction Condition pressed the space bar when they thought any child in the video demonstrated an intentionally musical behavior. When each subject pressed the space bar, a computer program recorded time stamp data. Subjects in the Early Childhood Music Teacher (ECMT) group identified significantly more music behaviors than subjects in the Child Development Teacher (CDT) group and the Musician group. There were no significant differences in the total number of music behaviors identified according to parental status or direction condition. Subjects in the ECMT group agreed statistically significantly more often than adults in the CDT group and the Musician group that behaviors demonstrated by children in the video were music behaviors. Adults in the Parent group agreed statistically significantly more often than adults in the Nonparent group that behaviors demonstrated by children in the video were music behaviors. When adults identify consensus acts, young children's music behaviors contain common features: beat-related movements and vocalizations. Adults in the ECMT group agreed significantly more often than adults in the CDT group and the Musician group that vocalizations demonstrated by young children were music behaviors. Adult ability to identify music behaviors as measured in this study is dependent upon musical training and experience, but not solely. Specialized early childhood music pedagogy may help adults identify behaviors (especially vocalizations) demonstrated by young children as music. / Music Education