2005 Volume 4 Issue 2 Pages 315-322
Observations of children playing in the neighborhoods of six cities in Vietnam present alternative views to the transaction of children′s activities and their neighborhood environment. They indicate that children′s activities are of such a complicated nature that each has in it a countable number of sub-activities called individual actions. Activity is a composite of these small actions and can successfully be defined by a structure of the interrelationships among these actions. This activity structure was analyzed and defined in terms of three dimensions – sequential relationship, dependence interaction, and dominance configuration.
Data also indicates that children′s activity is dependent on environment because its individual actions interact with environmental resources. Environmental resources are elements and qualities of children′s sociophysical environments required critically in the process of realizing the actions. Children in need of activity demand certain resources from the environment to realize the activity. It is, thus, suggested that individual actions, and activity as well, emerge as a result of the correlation between needed resources and found resources. This view demands an analysis that takes the interaction of individual action and environmental resource as a unit of analysis and as a way to operationalize human activity.
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