In this assignment, I will be reflecting on our presentation “The impact of Covid 19
lockdowns on early childhood development in the UK”. We decided upon this topic
as we felt as a collective that it was very relative to our job roles as practitioners in a
variety of settings as we are seeing both positive and negative impacts of UK based
Covid 19 lockdowns upon the children and their families at our workplace.
We felt that it would be beneficial for us to use a combination of primary and
secondary research methodology in order to broaden our understanding of the topic
at hand and then apply what we have discovered to our practice. We decided upon
splitting our efforts to organise our time more effectively; two of us would look at the
positive impacts and two of us would look at the negative impacts of lockdowns and
we did this by looking online at websites and journal articles due to a current lack of
information in physical books due to the recent nature of the topic at hand. I
personally designed a questionnaire that could be used for both parents and
practitioners that all members of the research team used in order to gather data and
conducted an online survey and then analysed and compiled the responses into a
format that could be easily interpreted by the reader.
Overall, a mixed methodological approach was decided to be the best fit for our
research as we were able to gather data from online quantitative/qualitative research
(websites and journal articles) and also use qualitative data with open ended surveys
and questionnaires to parents/guardians of the children that we personally looked
after during the lockdown time periods and as such we were able to recognise some
of the behaviours/changes in the children during their time in lockdown and learn
more about the children from the parent’s own observations of behaviours and
changes that we as practitioners may not have been able to observe within the
settings.
1
, Student number 2229165
As a group, we decided that it would be appropriate given our group size and the
recent nature of the topic at hand that we would select qualitative and quantitative
research that was outside our settings with the use of journal articles and websites
as a vast amount of data and articles and case studies have been published in these
formats. By using data gathered (primary method) as a result of our exploratory
study within our settings it helped us as practitioners to be able to make a personal
link by reflecting on the changes and behaviours of the children that we care for
within our settings and as such try to then be more mindful of their individual needs
and incorporate this into our working practice.
The drawback of this data gathering method was the fact that being parents of young
children, particularly during a very difficult time in UK history; it was tricky to get
responses to our surveys/questionnaires at times. Which led to me modifying my
approach to create an online, shorter survey using the online provider Typeform to
be used as an alternative method of gathering information over the paper based
parental survey that I created to be handed out to parents within our settings. Our
combined efforts led to 30 responses received.
This would also apply to our alternative target research pool, practitioners. I
designed a practitioner survey, both online and a paper one to be given in person in
order to gain a broader perspective on the topic at hand from colleagues. Whilst I
managed to personally receive a small handful of responses, it was trickier to gain a
wider number of responses; mainly due to time constraints faced by practitioners
within settings (staffing shortages, more responsibilities, changing ratios, longer
working days, etc).
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