New research to ask if toys work best in helping UK and immigrant kids’ friendships
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Psychologists at Goldsmiths, University of London will start new research this year to find out whether just three minutes of play with diverse Playmobil toys could encourage friendly interaction between UK-born children and recent arrivals from overseas.
A study led by the same researcher indicates that wheelchair-using Playmobil™ models can help children better imagine friendships with wheelchair-using peers.
Dr Sian Jones and Professor Adam Rutland (Department of Psychology) will test whether British children are better at imagining a friendship with an immigrant child if Playmobil™ is used, compared with other methods that don’t use physical stimuli, and simply ask them to imagine friendly contact.
With a small grant scheme award from the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust, the researchers will work, over a year, with 5-9 year olds in London’s culturally diverse schools.
By bringing imagined contact with kids from other cultures into a 3D realm, where children use Playmobil ™ children in a Playmobil ™ school to imagine interacting in a physical space, it’s hoped that their ideas about friendship will be better stimulated, and this will then transfer into a real-life setting.
The toys are expected to increase the ease by which children imagine positive interactions and then significantly improve their reactions to immigrants when they interact in the classroom or playground
Participants will be asked to play with the toys just once, for three minutes.
To confirm the toys’ effectiveness, the children will then be tested on their interaction with the profiles of immigrant children online, and whether they would fairly distribute resources, such as stickers, in a game with them.
Dr Jones’ research over the past few years has suggested that interacting in a Playmobil ™ playground improves friendship intentions towards disabled children. Kids get used to a Playmobil ™ toy figure in a wheelchair and see that model to be as socially important and capable of playing as the other models who do not use wheelchairs.
“A government drive towards inclusion in schools opens up opportunities for dialogue and engagement between groups, yet at the same time presents schools with new challenges, including dealing with bullying on the grounds of disability or ethnicity,” explains lead researcher Dr Jones.
“Everyone knows that encouraging interaction between different social groups improves children’s attitudes about others who they might see as ‘different’ to themselves. What we’ve shown, and hope to show with our new study, is that an intervention as cheap and simple as diverse plastic toys could be a great way to encourage that interaction, and really benefit school cohesion.”
