Why did we do this research?
By 2019, the PEDAL Centre had been running for four years. In that time we’d established several exciting projects to move forward the field of play research.
We wrote this paper to draw together some of the work we’d been doing that focused on “measuring play”.
How did we do it?
In the paper, we focused on ways we’ve measured children’s playfulness and play with friends and peers (in the Children’s Relationships with Peers through Play study) and measured parental playfulness and parent-child play (in the Healthy Start, Happy Start study).
We discussed why we’d designed studies the way we did, the ways we measured play, and possible ways this research could help us understand different aspects of parenting, children’s development, and family wellbeing.
These are just two of the many interesting research projects being carried out at PEDAL and we look forward to letting you know more about our other research in time.
Research paper
Read our open-access research paper in full, published in the International Journal of Play.