Knowledge about animals influences children’s beliefs about animals and the way they treat them, which makes forming a positive attitude towards animals one of the main goals of non-formal educational institutions. We can check zoo visitors’ beliefs by analysing their conversations near the individual species. The themes of their conversations depend on the purpose of the visit, social pattern of the group, beliefs and stereotypes, previous knowledge of the visitors and activity of the observed animal.
In my master's thesis, I used notes of conversations to research the potential differences between conversation categories, regarding the adult-child relation, and regarding the age groups of children commenting on different species (squirrel monkeys, chimpanzees and black-tufted marmosets). I was also interested in the understanding of chosen primates’ classification among different age groups, as well as the types of wrong or insufficient understanding of the species among children and adults, as having been concluded from their conversations. I also analysed types and frequency of conversations between parents and children.
My research included 420 visitors, of which 169 were children and 251 were adults. The estimated age of the children was between 6 and 11 years. I found out that most comments in their conversations were about the behaviour of the animals. Children mostly initiated and ended the conversations, there is not enough encouragement from the parents to widen their children’s knowledge. While talking about chimpanzees and squirrel monkeys all age groups mostly mentioned the behaviour of the animals. While talking about the black-tufted marmosets younger children talked about their body parts while older ones mostly commented on their space. I noticed that people still have a negative attitude towards primates, this is especially true towards the chimpanzees. Most wrong or insufficient beliefs appeared to be about feeding. There were no noticeable differences between age groups regarding the naming of the species. Children tend to use colloquial names and sometimes also wrong ones. Most conversations were about the enclosures of the animals, their behaviour and anatomy.
|