An investigation of social concepts used by preschool children in their story retelling and their social skills

This study was conducted with 20 children aged 48-72 months who received education in a preschool education institution in Kırıkkale province in the spring semester of the 2023-2024 academic year to examine the social concepts used by preschool children in story retellings and children's social skills. In the study, quantitative data were obtained by using the "General Information Form", the teacher form of the Preschool Social Skills Evaluation Scale (OSBED) (Aydoğan et al., 2014) and the "Story Comprehension Tool for Young Children" (Paris & Paris, 2003); qualitative data were obtained by listening to the audio recordings taken during the children's story retellings and analyzing them. Illustrated children's books "Roo The Roaring Dinosaur" (Bedford & Stanley, 2017), "A Busy Year" (Lionni, 2022) and "Elmer" (Mckee, 2019) were used as data collection tools during the interviews with children. In quantitative data analysis, the relationship between social skills, story comprehension questions, and word count was examined with Pearson correlation coefficient. Qualitative data were analyzed by content analysis. After the data obtained from the children's voice recordings were transcribed, codes were created in line with the purpose of the research with an deductive approach. The relevant codes were grouped into categories and themes were reached from the categories. The quantitative and qualitative data collected were analyzed and the results obtained were combined to reveal the relationships between the data obtained from the two data sets. In line with the findings obtained in the study, it was concluded that there were significant positive relationships between children's social skills scores, word counts and story comprehension scores. As a result of the qualitative analysis of children's narratives in picture children's books; data on words on business cards, academic relations support, friendship relations, management management themes and extra friendship relations themes were observed.