Maria Aleksandrovich
Developmental Psychology, Volume 26 Issue 1, 2021, pp. 63-80
https://doi.org/10.4467/20843879PR.21.005.14119Artistic activities are one of the basic and most important activities during childhood. They are a rich source of information about child’s development, their values and temperament as well as their sense of aesthetics and beauty. At the same time these abilities have attracted considerable attention as a research field of interest in developmental psychology. This article presents results of research aimed at examining the level of 2D and 3D artistic activities performed by children aged 7–9 years, as well as at comparing the quality of these works. The acquisition of additional data pertaining to the research group made it possible to conduct a precise statistical analysis, which has been combined with the observations enabled the formulation of constructive and undoubtedly interesting conclusions. Conduct of the undertaken research was possible thanks to the careful selection of appropriate qualitative and quantitative methods – i.e., the observation method, the method of analysing the child’s products, the ability test (Goodenough-Harris Draw-A-Man Test) and the statistical analysis (descriptive statistics, Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient). The artworks used in the study were created by 50 children aged 7–9 years, which formed an extensive research group in which, as assumed, an impressive number of correlations related to children’s 2D and 3D plastic skills were demonstrated. The conducted qualitative and quantitative research allowed for the statistical confirmation of the presence of both a strong positive correlation between the ability to perform 2D and 3D art work by children aged 7–9 years, and a number of complementary correlations between the age of the child and his/her artistic abilities, between education of both parents and child’s artistic abilities, as well as between mother’s education and the number of children she has.