Young children's perception of danger

Abstract

Accidents are the major cause of childhood mortality and morbidity in industrialized societies. To devise effective programmes of accident prevention, it is necessary to obtain some estimate of young children's ability to perceive danger. Our study describes the abilities of children aged 3 to 6 years to perceive dangers commonly involved in childhood accidents—e.g. accidental falls, accidents involving scalds and burns, cuts and lacerations, electrocution, drowning, etc. Age effects, sex differences, and socio‐economic background effects are considered in the results of two studies, which ask children to identify and recognize dangerous situations.

Young children's concepts of danger

“…This is in line with other research (e.g. Grieve & Williams, 1985). However, this advantage did not extend to salience of danger.…”

“…Previous studies of children's understanding of danger have used line drawings (e.g. Grieve & Williams, 1985). However, such schematic representations of situations are necessarily static and can be very unrealistic.…”

“…In order to examine more closely children's understanding of danger, children were presented with a task which was similar to that used in Expt 1 in that they had to identify a situation as dangerous, but differed in that they had to select a dangerous situation from a set of four similar situations. This task was similar to one used by Grieve and Williams (1985) and used the same drawings as in Expt 1. The use of the same materials with a different procedure allowed a better understanding of the basis of children's responses.…”

“…when moving away or very distant). Similarly, some of the younger children in Grieve and Williams' (1985) study of children's perception of danger judged items such as res and swimming pools as dangerous even when they were guarded or supervised. It may be that young children have come to understand that certain things are dangerous without understanding the nature of the danger.…”

“…This was selected because it is an appropriate indicator of socio-economic status (SES) and children from families of lower socioeconomic status experience higher casualty rates (Christie, 1995). One possible explanation of the SES effect is that these children receive different levels of instruction, either in quality or in quantity (Grieve & Williams, 1985). Finally, a measure was taken of the level of traf c exposure experienced by the children to investigate whether experience of traf c is related to awareness and understanding of danger.…”