Okul Öncesi Dönem Çocuklarda Kişilerarası Sorun Çözme Becerilerinin İncelenmesi: Kuzey Kıbrıs Örneği

During the pre-school period, children interact with their peers and teachers along with their mothers and fathers. During this interaction, children have some problems from time to time as they established positive relationships. The problems in interpersonal relationships help in understanding the feelings, requests and opinions of people. At the same time, these problems cause more comprehensive issues in later years (Bingham, 1998). Children who have weak problem solving skills have been found, in many studies, to show behavior problems such as aggression, physical violence and lack of patience in later years. During the preschool period, when the children gain interpersonal problem solving skills, all developmental areas including social and cognitive fields advance and thus, behavioral problems decrease. In this research, PIPS (Preschool Interpersonal Problem Solving Test), which is one of the components of ICPS (Interpersonal Cognitive Problem Solving) developed by Shure (1992), was used to examine interpersonal problem solving skills of 5-6 years old children who attend pre-schools. The data for this research, which is of descriptive model, was collected using face to face interview process with total of 80 children who continue pre-school education. The obtained data in this study was analyzed with SPSS 20.0 software. At the end of this research, significant differences in favor of 6 year old were found in points for categorizing and solving peer problems. Despite there being differences in favor of girls in categorizing and solving mother and child problems, these are not significant. Also, significant differences in favor of social category and solutions were obtained in total categorizing and solutions of children. The averages for category and solutions produced for interpersonal problems were found to be higher than studies done in the past years. Keywords: Early childhood education, ınterpersonal relations, problem behaviors, interpersonal problems, problem solving skills.