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. 2023 Dec 5:14:1287274.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1287274. eCollection 2023.

Playfulness from children's perspectives: development and validation of the Children's Playfulness Scale as a self-report instrument for children from 3 years of age

Isabelle Duss  1 , Cornelia Rüdisüli  2 , Corina Wustmann Seiler  2 , Patricia Lannen  1
Affiliations

Playfulness from children's perspectives: development and validation of the Children's Playfulness Scale as a self-report instrument for children from 3 years of age

Isabelle Duss et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

Children's playfulness refers to children's enjoyment, motivation, and engagement in play and has been predominantly assessed from an adult perspective. To assess children's perspectives on their own playfulness, we adapted and modified the Children's Playfulness Scale (CPS) for children from 3 years and used a two-level response format with a total of four answer options. We tested the self-report scale with 564 children between 3 and 8 years of age who attended childcare center or kindergarten. Results indicated that the adapted version of the CPS identified the five distinct domains of playfulness: social spontaneity, cognitive spontaneity, physical spontaneity, sense of humor, and manifest joy; furthermore, results showed invariance across multiple groups for gender, age, and language skills. A highly significant positive correlation was found between children's self-reported playfulness and children's self-reported social self-concept (r = 0.54, p < 0.001), which demonstrates convergent validity. No association was found with teacher proxy report of children's playfulness (r = 0.03, p = 0.92). Overall, our study confirmed first indications of the validity of the modified CPS as a reliable instrument for assessing children's self-reported playfulness. This enables children as young as 3 years old to be assessed on their own playfulness, which is a valuable supplement to the adult perspective.

Keywords: children; multiple-group invariance testing; play; playfulness; self-concept; self-report; validation.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. The present study and the publication of this article were financially supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. 100019_192422).

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