Measurement of the reception of fairy rales – a possible model

Abstract

It is always a difficult task to make a survey among little children. If we want to have several kids interviewed, it is very time-consuming. If we want them to fill in a questionnaire about a tale told, it might not give us the information we really are looking for. It is especially true if we want to grasp the young ones’ experience in connection with the tales they have listened to and not to interrogate them in connection with the information we think is important in the tales from the point of the view of the understanding of the story. The aim of the present study is to introduce a possible model with the help of which we can make a survey among children quite easily. We have used the free word association method to see how the children relate to different modern re-written fairy tale types and their original story. Before the main survey we have conducted a preliminary research when nearly four hundred – mainly second grade – children wrote down words and expressions related to their preference for tales. Having listed the items written by them, we have asked coders to put the expressions into categories, which served as a basis for further comparison. We have chosen six pairs of tales (a classical story and its modern pair) which have represented different types of re-written versions of fairy tales. After pre-stesting we have told the six pairs of tales in six different schools to thirty (fifteen boys and fifteen girls) schoolchildren. Besides the free word association method we have
also used a colourful thermometer (that is a 0-5 scale), with the help of which they had to indicate how much they liked the tale. Every single sheet of paper has been coded and the results have been evaluated with the help of SPSS program. The results we could see on the thermometer – that is on the scale – was not always the same as what (and how much!) the chidren wrote about the tales. The analysis of the answers gained, the explanation of the results proved to be a really exciting task.