”Et blikk på barns vilkår for fysisk aktivitet i barnehager. En komparativ studie, 1981 og 2009”.

The purpose of this article is to examine what types of play equipment and what kind of natural surroundings exist in and at daycare facilities, and how child carers assess these elements of the physical environment with regard to physical activity. In 1982, the author published a study in which she examined the physical environment at daycare facilities, and the article from 2011 is a study very similar to the study from 1982. Another purpose of this article is to compare the results from the two studies in order to analyse the changes that have been made in the physical environment of the daycare facilities from 1981 to 2009.

The study shows that today daycare facilities have more play equipment and more natural areas than they had in 1981, and the child carers assess the play environment to be better than the child carers assessed in 1981. At the same time, the study shows that the child carers in 2009 assess that more children are very physically active and fewer children are not physically active or normally physical active than assessed by the child carers in 1981.

A questionnaire on the daycare facility’s physical environment and the children’s level of activity was sent to 483 daycare facilities, which corresponds to about one in 11 daycare facilities in Norway. A total of 287 daycare facilities answered the questionnaire, which corresponds to a response rate of 59.4%. The questions in the questionnaire were identical with the questions from the 1982 study. The answers were processed through frequency analyses and cross tabulation in the statistics program SPSS.

Stokke, A. (2011). ”Et blikk på barns vilkår for fysisk aktivitet i barnehager. En komparativ studie, 1981 og 2009”. Barn nr. 1, 27-47.