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The relationship between the child and his/her physical environment is an area of interaction that includes social, psychological and cultural factors along with the spatial experience, perception and behavior of the child. This study is based on the effects of spatial perception and behavior of the child within the physical environment of primary schools. In this direction, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how spatial and physical characteristics of primary school typologies affect the spatial perception and behavior of the child. Also, the parameters affecting spatial perception and behavior are examined.

The question to be investigated is how the spatial and physical characteristics of the school’s physical environment affect the child’s spatial perception and behavior in primary schools with different typologies. Within this scope, Istanbul’s Kagithane region is selected as a case study. Schools are chosen for their similar spatial and dimensional features and similar socio-economic environment. The methodology of the study consists of a literature review, an observational study carried out to discover the interaction between the child and his/her school building and the analysis of the student’s cognitive maps. These maps were evaluated according to topological, projective, metric and imaginative parameters.

The results show spatial organization and physical characteristics of primary school buildings with a structure that allows for change and transformation, and contributes to the physical and cognitive development of children.

This study will provide an opportunity to develop the design of future primary school buildings that can support the spatial perception and spatial experiences of the children.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of pediatricians' obesity and gender on children's perceptions of physicians. In particular, to examine the extent and direction of obesity and gender on children's perceptions of likability, expertise, and trustworthiness.

The study utilizes an experimental design. The actual sample is 138 children between six and 12 years of age.

The results indicate that physicians' gender did not influence children's perception of pediatricians' personal characteristics. However, physicians' obesity did influence children's perceptions. Specifically, obese pediatricians were judged less likable and less expert than non‐obese pediatricians.

The research informs two important gaps in the literature. First, personal characteristics influence perceptions of credibility, and children perceive obese persons negatively, just as adults do. Second, the paper lays out a rigorous experimental design that adapts scales and materials for use with child‐subjects.

This study aims to examine factors, beyond child requests, that influence parents’ perceptions of the most important gifts to give their children by assessing the influence of television advertising on children’s programming.

Using agenda-setting as a theoretical and methodological template, a content analysis of 7,860 commercials in children’s programming was compared using a questionnaire to 143 parents of 240 children to test the transfer of salience between advertising and parents’ perceptions. The study also examined the role of child purchase requests in this relationship.

The product categories that most prevalently advertised on children’s television had a significant relationship with the product categories that parents perceived to be the most important to give their children as gifts. Furthermore, the results indicate that this relationship was not contingent upon parental advertising mediation or child product requests.

The results are limited to a single broadcast market during the Christmas season. Strategically, the research suggests that advertising through children’s television programming may be an effective way to directly inform parents’ gift-giving consideration sets, and this target and outlet should be strategically evaluated in subsequent campaign decisions about the marketing mix.

The findings add new insights to the gift-giving literature, indicating that advertising in children’s programming may be an alternative direct influence on parents’ perceptions. This research also extends research on advertising agenda setting into the new context of commercial advertising of consumer products.

This paper aims to examine the perceptions of the visual packaging of snacks and nutrition knowledge among preschool children. Packages serve as persuasive media at the point of purchase.

In this paper 13 interviews with four-year-olds were conducted. Children sorted seven snacks that implied fruit into categories based on perceptions of fun, taste, parent’s choice and “nutrition”. Children also drew trees with food that would make them healthy or not healthy.

Children attended to the package elements more than the product. All children selected the character fruit snack as their preferred choice; however, perceptions for fun and taste varied among snacks. Perceptions of healthiness showed evidence of heuristics (e.g. sugar = bad; fruit = good). Some children were able to understand that their parents’ choices may be different from their own.

Because of the small sample size, it is not possible to generalize results to all children. Children seemed to understand that the character may not convey “healthy” or “taste”, but they still chose the snack with a character.

Children as young as four can understand nutrition heuristics and may/may not use those heuristics in product preferences.

Children may be able to reason about their own preferences and others’ preferences at a preoperational stage of development.

Previous research indicates that older children are attracted by characters. The findings show that younger children also prefer characters but may be capable of disentangling the various associations of “characters”.

This paper aims to identify the perception levels of the child and parents towards the child’s influence on different product categories and stages of the family buying process in an Arab country Oman.

On the basis of the research gap identified from the literature, two separate bilingual questionnaires (parent and child) in English and local language (Arabic) were developed. The research commenced with a pilot study on 10 school students followed by contact with school authorities requesting to conduct a survey on school students 8–12 years of age and data collection through the survey on the students and their parents (either father/mother) during September-November, 2017–2018. Data analysis was made through an independent sample t-test and confirmatory factor analysis was made using AMOS 24.

A model was proposed incorporating three product categories as noisy, quiet and loud goods and perceptions of Arab parents and children were examined for the three stages of the family buying process. The findings of the study reveal that significant differences exist in child-parental perceptions on the child’s influence in the search, evaluation and final buying stages. The mean score among the three product categories was highest for noisy goods (Mean = 3.21, SD = 0.817) while in the case of buying stages, the mean of the final buying stage was highest (Mean = 2.11, SD = 0.514).

More research studies are required in the Arab context, especially bringing in the social status of parents to justify their different shopping behaviours. This analysis is based on the perceptions of the tweenager segment, adding perceptions of the teenage segment could generate better research implications.

The research will serve as a base to consumer marketers in understanding distinct features of Arab tweenagers towards different products and will aid them in designing appropriate marketing strategies targeting parents and children in the Arab region.

After an extensive review of the consumer literature, it is assumed that almost no research study has been made examining parent-child perceptions towards the different product categories and buying stages targeting traditionally oriented families in the Arab region.

Parents are important agents in the physical activity socializing process in children. The present study aims to examine the parental mediatory role in children's physical activity participation via a youth physical activity promotion (YPAP) model.

A total of 872 Hong Kong Chinese children (aged ten to 13) in ten schools were invited to participate in the study. Their physical self‐perception, physical activity perception, parental influence, and physical activity level were assessed. Structural equation modelling was employed to examine the relationship among the variables.

The final model accounted for 18 per cent of the variance in children's physical activity participation. Parental influence imposed a direct (β=0.19) and indirect effect on children's physical activity participation through the children's physical activity perception (β=0.33) and physical self‐perceptions (β=0.19).

This study involved a cross‐sectional design and data were collected over a single time frame; a cause‐and‐effect relationship among variables could not be drawn.

The present study emphasizes how parental influence is related to children's physical participation. The information is useful for health professionals in the design of intervention programs to promote children's physical activity participation.

This chapter examines social variations in parent dissatisfaction with children’s medical care and tests whether greater dissatisfaction is associated with less preventive care and unmet medical need.

The 2007 National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH) is a nationally representative cross-sectional sample of parents of U.S. children age 0–17 years (N=78,523). We use a combination of ordinary least squares (OLS) and binary logistic regression to analyze parent dissatisfaction, preventive care, and unmet medical need.

Our results indicate that parents’ dissatisfaction scores are significantly higher for racial/ethnic minorities, non-English speakers, lower socioeconomic status (SES) respondents, and the uninsured. Furthermore, parent dissatisfaction has a significant and robust association with lack of preventive care and reports of unmet medical need.

Due to the cross-sectional research design, we were unable to determine whether dissatisfaction caused parents to delay children’s medical care, thus resulting in a lack of annual preventive care and greater unmet needs.

Although there is extensive research on adult perceptions of their own medical care, few sociological studies have examined parents’ perceptions about their children’s care. Yet, there is substantial evidence that parents transmit health-related attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to their children. As with adult patients, parent satisfaction with their child’s medical care is stratified by social characteristics; however, we also find a strong association between dissatisfaction and use of other important health services. It may be the case that when parents feel that they did not receive satisfactory care, they are more likely to delay, or to forgo, preventive and other health services.

This paper extends the behavioral ecology framework to predict how individuals perceive and evaluate risks. The perceptions of health and safety hazards for females, and how those perceptions relate to resource security and resource acquisition are examined. Poverty and inequality affect the constraints and opportunities available for Hispanic women working in apple packing warehouses in Eastern Washington. Warehouse workers see the health and safety risks inherent in their work and view the hazards from their positions of relative vulnerability with respect to resources. They are active agents who evaluate their situations and work to provide secure resources for themselves and their offspring within the local political and socioeconomic context.

All school staff need to have a critical self-understanding of how their perceptions of children, childhood and risk inform their practice when they are engaging with children and reflecting on factors linked to safeguarding. This chapter begins by discussing and briefly revisiting the duties and obligations that all staff have in relation to safeguarding children in educational settings. It then goes onto discuss the concept of teachers as ‘significant non parental adults’ (Rishel, Sales, & Koeske, 2005) and explores some of the finer details of why teachers and teaching staff are key players in relation to identifying risks, preventing harms whilst dealing with safeguarding concerns. We conclude this chapter by illustrating and arguing that teachers are key players identifying the needs of children and also have the potential to influence positive behaviour change in them. We also set a context for the remainder of this section: understanding the nature of concerns and risk by outlining the contribution each of the remaining individual chapters has to bring to this collection.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate excess body weight and abdominal obesity in relation to selected psychosocial characteristics such as self-perception, self-esteem and anxiety, in primary school children.

A school-based cross-sectional study was conducted with a total of 528 students 10-12 years of age, randomly selected, from the area of Athens, Greece. The Greek versions of the self-perception profile for children (SPPC) and the state-trait anxiety inventory for children (STAI-C) questionnaires have been used to determine the children’s self-perception/self-esteem and the status of anxiety, respectively. Standard anthropometric measurements were also taken. Pearson correlation coefficient was used to test for possible linear correlations between data variables. One-way ANOVA and independent t-test were used to determine statistically significant differences between the means of children’s body mass index (BMI) – abdominal obesity groups. For multiple comparisons, Bonferroni post-tests were run.

Overweight and obese children and children with abdominal obesity had lower scores in all of the domains of SPPC self-perception, the SPPC global self-esteem and the STAI-C anxiety levels in comparison to normal weight children. BMI and abdominal obesity correlated negatively with each one of the five domains of the SPPC self-perception (p < 0.001) and the SPPC global self-esteem (p < 0.001) and positively with the STAI-C anxiety levels (p < 0.005). One-way ANOVA and independent t-test revealed statistically significant differences between the means of children’s BMI and abdominal obesity groups in all the domains of SPPC self-perception (p < 0.001), the SPPC global self-esteem (p < 0.001) and the STAI-C anxiety levels (p < 0.005). There were no gender differences in the psychometric characteristics assessed in this study.

Primary school children with excess body weight and abdominal obesity have increased anxiety levels and they score lower in key psychosocial characteristics, in comparison to normal weight children.