A Framework to Assess Where and How Children Connect to Nature

Abstract

The design of the green infrastructure in urban areas largely ignores how people's relation to nature, or human-nature connection (HNC), can be nurtured. One practical reason for this is the lack of a framework to guide the assessment of where people, and more importantly children, experience significant nature situations and establish nature routines. This paper develops such a framework. We employed a mixed-method approach to understand what qualities of nature situations connect children to nature (RQ1), what constitutes children's HNC (RQ2), and how significant nature situations and children's HNC relate to each other over time (RQ3). We first interviewed professionals in the field of connecting children to nature (N = 26), performed inductive thematic analysis of these interviews, and then further examined the inductive findings by surveying specialists (N = 275). We identified 16 qualities of significant nature situations (e.g., “awe,” “engagement of senses,” “involvement of mentors”) and 10 abilities that constitute children's HNC (e.g., “feeling comfortable in natural spaces,” “feeling attached to natural spaces,” “taking care of nature”). We elaborated three principles to answer our research questions: (1) significant nature situations are various and with differing consequences for children's HNC; (2) children's HNC is a complex embodied ability; (3) children's HNC progresses over time through diverse nature routines. Together, these findings form the Assessment framework for Children's Human Nature Situations (ACHUNAS). ACHUNAS is a comprehensive framework that outlines what to quantify or qualify when assessing “child-nature connecting” environments. It guides the assessment of where and how children connect to nature, stimulating both the design of nature-connecting human habitats as well as pedagogical approaches to HNC.

Full text

ORIGINAL RESEARCH
published: 04 January 2018
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02283
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 1January 2018 | Volume 8 | Article 2283
Edited by:
Marketta Kyttä,
Aalto University, Finland
Reviewed by:
Eleanor Ratcliffe,
Imperial College London,
United Kingdom
Pablo Olivos,
Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha,
Spain
*Correspondence:
Matteo Giusti
matteo.giusti@su.se
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Environmental Psychology,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 15 August 2017
Accepted: 14 December 2017
Published: 04 January 2018
Citation:
Giusti M, Svane U, Raymond CM and
Beery TH (2018) A Framework to
Assess Where and How Children
Connect to Nature.
Front. Psychol. 8:2283.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02283
A Framework to Assess Where and
How Children Connect to Nature
Matteo Giusti 1
*, Ulrika Svane 1, Christopher M. Raymond 2and Thomas H. Beery 3
1Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden, 2Department of Landscape Architecture, Planning
and Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden, 3School of Education and Environment,
Kristianstad University College, Kristianstad, Sweden
The design of the green infrastructure in urban areas largely ignores how people’s
relation to nature, or human-nature connection (HNC), can be nurtured. One practical
reason for this is the lack of a framework to guide the assessment of where people,
and more importantly children, experience significant nature situations and establish
nature routines. This paper develops such a framework. We employed a mixed-method
approach to understand what qualities of nature situations connect children to nature
(RQ1), what constitutes children’s HNC (RQ2), and how significant nature situations and
children’s HNC relate to each other over time (RQ3). We first interviewed professionals
in the field of connecting children to nature (N=26), performed inductive thematic
analysis of these interviews, and then further examined the inductive findings by surveying
specialists (N=275). We identified 16 qualities of significant nature situations (e.g.,
“awe,” “engagement of senses,” “involvement of mentors”) and 10 abilities that constitute
children’s HNC (e.g., “feeling comfortable in natural spaces,” “feeling attached to natural
spaces,” “taking care of nature”). We elaborated three principles to answer our research
questions: (1) significant nature situations are various and with differing consequences
for children’s HNC; (2) children’s HNC is a complex embodied ability; (3) children’s HNC
progresses over time through diverse nature routines. Together, these findings form the
Assessment framework for Children’s Human Nature Situations (ACHUNAS). ACHUNAS
is a comprehensive framework that outlines what to quantify or qualify when assessing
“child-nature connecting” environments. It guides the assessment of where and how
children connect to nature, stimulating both the design of nature-connecting human
habitats as well as pedagogical approaches to HNC.
Keywords: assessment framework, child-nature-connectedness, human-nature connection, significant nature
situations, nature routines, sustainable urban design, environmental education, mix-method approach
INTRODUCTION
Academic discourse is increasingly focused on how people see themselves in relation to nature
(Ives et al., 2017). In the last few decades, academic interest in human-nature connection, or HNC,
has spread from evolutionary explanations (Kellert and Wilson, 1993), to psychological constructs
like ecological identity (Naess, 1973), nature relatedness (Nisbet et al., 2008) and inclusion with
nature (Schultz, 2002), and across the scholarships of environmental and conservation psychology
(Saunders and Myers, 2003; Gifford and Nilsson, 2014; Zylstra et al., 2014), landscape management

Giusti et al. ACHUNAS: Assessing Children’s Nature Situations
(Lewicka, 2011; Meyfroidt, 2013), biological conservation
(Miller, 2006; Simaika and Samways, 2010), and more recently
urban design (Andersson et al., 2014; Marcus et al., 2016; Colding
and Barthel, 2017). Despite the heterogeneity of approaches,
this body of literature consistently reports two trends. First, a
set of values and beliefs facilitates pro-environmental choices
and behaviors (Black et al., 1985; Guagnano et al., 1995; Stern,
2000; Hunecke et al., 2001; Thogersen, 2005; Kaiser et al.,
2011). Second, a deep-seated HNC is nurtured by direct nature
interaction during childhood (Chawla, 1998, 1999; Kahn, 2002;
Evans et al., 2007; Hsu, 2009) and is remarkably stable in
adulthood (Kaiser et al., 2014). These two trends highlight the
importance of early nature experiences in shaping psychological
traits of HNC, and suggest that HNC has a role to play in the
transgenerational establishment of sustainable futures (Matsuba
et al., 2012; Conrad, 2017).
Approaches to sustainability science that analyze social-
ecological systems have broadly discussed a shared societal
mindset of connection to nature (Folke, 2006; Folke et al., 2011;
Díaz et al., 2015; Fischer et al., 2015). In this line of research,
social and ecological dynamics are conceptualized as components
of a single integrated system in which structure, goals, and
overall trajectory are shaped by society’s mindset (Meadows,
2008). The encompassing concept of HNC has, therefore,
been considered the strongest leverage point to transform or
transition a social-ecological system toward a desirable, resilient,
and sustainable future (Abson et al., 2017). It follows from
all the considerations above that direct experiences of nature
during childhood are fundamental moments of sustainable
enculturation, with long-lasting consequences for sustainable
social-ecological systems. Considering how the physical living
environment of humankind, i.e., the human habitat, provides
nature experiences for children is therefore a crucial step toward
reaching sustainable developmental goals.
In 2014, 54 percent of humankind lived in cities, and by 2050,
66 percent of the world’s population is projected to be urban
(United Nations, 2014). Cities are, and increasingly will be, the
most common human habitat. The urban green infrastructure,
or its absence, will, therefore, be the leading background of
children’s direct experiences of nature. In this built landscape
children will experience what nature is, what it is made of, how it
works, and eventually create expectations for what nature should
be in the future (Kahn, 2002). So, the obvious question to ask is:
“is the urban nature designed to nurture children’s HNC?” The
short answer is no. Contrary to the standards advocated by the
UN New Urban Agenda of “universal access to safe, inclusive
and accessible, green and public spaces” (General Assembly,
2015, 22) the urbanization process largely ignores the design
of nature experiences with measured penalties for public health
(Lederbogen et al., 2011; Bratman et al., 2012; Hartig and Kahn,
2016), personal development (Chawla, 2015; de Keijzer et al.,
2016), and the emotions, attitudes, and behaviors that define
HNC (Giusti et al., 2014; Soga and Gaston, 2016). The absence
of nature experiences in the human habitat is so severe that
is also referred to as “extinction of experience” (Pyle, 1993)
and it is an active concern in environmental education (Finch,
2008), environmental conservation (Miller, 2005; Samways, 2007;
Simaika and Samways, 2010) and public health alike (Soga and
Gaston, 2016). Overall, the urban space is far from being a human
habitat that promotes a connection between its inhabitants and
nature.
Two interlinked obstacles that hinder the design of “nature-
connecting” human habitats come from an ontological
separation between mind and body in modern urban
design (Metzger, 2013). First, the dominant model of urban
design is characterized by the top-down implementation
of body functions, such as housing, working, recreation
and transportation (Le Corbusier, 1943; Cities European
Council of Town Planners, 1998). However, this linear and
compartmentalized approach to urban living fails when
challenged to address social and psychological requirements
such as livability or HNC (Gehl, 2010; Portugali, 2011; Marcus
et al., 2016). Modern urban design does not structure the relation
between humans and environments beyond its material facets
(Marcus et al., 2016; Samuelsson et al., 2017). Second, there are
no tools to identify if the green infrastructure connects people
to nature or not, nor to quantify or qualify where “extinction of
experience” happens. There are indeed no standard criteria or
guidelines to assess or categorize an environment as more or less
“nature-connecting.” As a consequence, there is no possibility
to even conceive what “connecting” environments could be or
should look like in the design process. Questions like “where
do people connect to nature?” and “what kind of ‘connecting’
nature experiences are missing from cities?” are fundamental to
design green infrastructure that connects people nature, but they
cannot be answered yet. The overarching purpose of this paper is
to address this shortcoming.
In this paper we aim to develop a practical framework
that defines criteria and guidelines that allow users to assess
if an environment connects children to nature or not. We
have been inspired by Heft’s (1988) seminal work, in which he
identified sets of suitable relations between children’s behaviors
and outdoor environments that have been consequently used
to assess if an environment is more or less “child-friendly”
(Kyttä, 2002, 2006). In support of this aim identify which sets
of relations can categorize an environment as more or less
“child-nature-connecting.” Classifying an environment as more
or less child-friendly relies on quantifying or qualifying an
environment using lists of behavioral and social criteria that
are suitable for children. As of yet, a similar list of criteria
to assess environments that nurture children’s HNC does not
exist. This paper fills this gap. Rephrasing the definition of
the “obesogenicity” property of an environment (Swinburn
et al., 1999), we define here “child-nature-connectedness” as
“the sum of influences that the surroundings, opportunities, or
conditions of life have on promoting human-nature connection
in individuals or populations of children.” In other words,
the properties that allow a social-ecological system to connect
children to nature. The goal of this paper is, therefore, not
to provide a tool that prescribes how to measure child-nature-
connecting environments, but a framework that outlines the
list of criteria of what ought to be measured. We note
that in order to provide a useful framework any list of
criteria should be sufficiently comprehensive of all relations
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Giusti et al. ACHUNAS: Assessing Children’s Nature Situations
that indicate children’s HNC; transferable across different
children and cultures; and of practical use for practitioners and
researchers to identify where and how children connect with
nature. Thus, we develop and test the framework for these
properties to initiate the design of nature-connecting human
habitats and inform educational programs that aspire to connect
children to nature.
In the next section, we present the theoretical overview
of HNC and the “child-nature-connecting” property of
environment. We provide an overview of the concepts used and
the three research questions in section Overview of Concepts
and Research Questions. We then outline the methodology
of this mixed-methods investigation, which involves an initial
qualitative and inductive phase that informs a quantitative and
testing phase. We then present the results and critically discuss
them in relation to the goal of the paper.
AN EMBODIED APPROACH TO
HUMAN-NATURE CONNECTION AND
CHILD-NATURE-CONNECTEDNESS
Despite an exponential growth in research on HNC in the
last decade epistemological and ontological differences prevent
the development of an instrument to assess child-nature-
connectedness of environments using the existing literature.
For example, HNC has been experimentally studied as an
independent attribute of the mind, qualitatively observed and
described through nature experiences elsewhere, and also
investigated as a relationship between people and specific
geographical locations (Ives et al., 2017). These co-existing bodies
of literature are somewhat complementary, but unsuitable for
comparison or integration with each other because of their
fundamentally different epistemological traditions (Ives et al.,
2017). For instance, “connectedness to nature” (Schultz, 2002;
Mayer and Frantz, 2004), “nature relatedness” (Nisbet et al.,
2008), and “environmental identity” (Clayton, 2003) are central
conceptualizations of HNC in environmental psychology, but
they can be difficult to unify with evolutionary conceptualizations
of HNC (Kellert and Wilson, 1993; Beery et al., 2015) or
theories of sustainability transformation (Manfredo et al., 2014;
Abson et al., 2017). Additionally, the ontological nature of such
literature presents further challenges to identify the important
criteria of child-nature-connectedness.
Despite a variety of research approaches in HNC, the majority
of studies operationalize a disembodied ontology of HNC, in
which contextual factors are independent and often dismissed
objects of investigation. An indication of the widespread use of
such disembodied ontologies is that even though most studies
specifically evaluate some form of personal HNC, the vast
majority do not define what kind of nature people tend to connect
to (Ives et al., 2017). Existing research has mostly investigated
HNC as cognitive abstractions and attitudinal attributes, using
an experimental approach that mostly ignores the role of
people’s body, culture, and environmental context (Gifford, 2014;
Zylstra et al., 2014; Restall and Conrad, 2015; Lumber et al.,
2017). Different disembodied conceptualizations of psychological
HNC (Mayer and Frantz, 2004; Perrin and Benassi, 2009) have
indeed been shown to be overlapping (Tam, 2013; Restall and
Conrad, 2015) and with limited assessment capacity in real-
world situations (Duffy and Verges, 2010; Ernst and Theimer,
2011; Bruni et al., 2015). Some have suggested that this limited
capacity for real-world assessments derives from socio-physical
de-contextualization (Duffy and Verges, 2010; Meyfroidt, 2013;
Beery and Wolf-Watz, 2014; Restall and Conrad, 2015). A
distinctive example of how de-contextualization affects real-
world assessments is from two studies that used the same
experimental design and methodology to assess “connectedness
to nature” in two different locations and attributed opposite
results to climate differences (Verges and Duffy, 2010; Bruni
et al., 2012). The existing empirical evidence produced by
disembodied conceptualizations of HNC and experimental
approaches is often a deductive testing of theoretically-prompted
concepts, and, therefore, has limited usefulness to construct a
practical framework of assessment, which we aim to develop in
this paper.
Limitations of disembodied operationalizations of HNC can
be also found in environmental education. Since its inception
with the Tbilisi declaration in 1977, a key goal of environmental
education has been “to search for a new ethic based on respect
for nature” (UNESCO, 1978, 28). However, the disembodied
separation between body and mind assumed in environmental
education has favored curricula that abound in ecological
knowledge, but ignores practical skills and social circumstances
(Hungerford et al., 1980). Despite environmental knowledge
being widely available and promoted, children’s experiences
in nature has never been so rare (Soga and Gaston, 2016)
and the ecological crisis never been so obvious. Environmental
educators such as Nazir and Pedretti (2016) also recognized these
limitations when they write:
“For some time now, researchers and practitioners in the field
of environmental education have been recommending a shift
away from a focus on cognitive knowing about the environment
toward raising peoples’ environmental consciousness in deep and
substantive ways (see, e.g., Gough, 1987; Gruenewald, 2004; Kahn,
2008; Bowers, 2009; Wals and Dillon, 2013). Bai and Romanycia
(2013, 105) suggest that environmental consciousness raising is
really about [. . . ] making ecological principles into habits of mind,
body and heart [. . . ] creating spaces for multiple, meaningful
interactions to take place (Wals and Dillon, 2013) and providing
contextual embodied experiences (Greenwood, 2013)” (p. 288, 301).
To overcome the limitations shown above and investigate the
criteria needed to assess child-nature-connectedness we then
reject an ontological separation between mind and body and
operationalize a relational, or transactional (Altman and Rogoff,
1987), approach based on affordance theory (Gibson, 1979)
called embodied ecosystem (Raymond et al., 2017). The theory
of affordances is a relational approach to human perception
and behavior posited by Gibson (1979) that is defined by the
relations that exist between humans’ abilities and the features
of the environment (Chemero, 2009). Traditionally, affordances
have been assessed from a functional standpoint while ignoring
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Giusti et al. ACHUNAS: Assessing Children’s Nature Situations
the emotional dimensions that act as the motivational basis for
action (Kyttä, 2003). A renowned example of this is Heft’s (1988)
list of children-outdoor relations mentioned above that inspired
this research. However, “Gibson hardly wanted to divide the world
up into material, social, or cultural worlds, as he was against
all division of environmental experience” (Kyttä, 2002, 76) and
in recent times we have seen attempts to include emotional
(Roe and Aspinall, 2011) and social affordances (Kyttä, 2006)
in assessment models of human-environment relations (Kyttä,
2006; Broberg et al., 2013). One of the latest formulations of
affordance-based theory is the concept of embodied ecosystem,
which highlights the relational values of ecosystems that
dynamically emerge by the sets of relations existing between
mind, body, culture, and environment (Raymond et al., 2017).
By adopting the concept of embodied ecosystem in this research
we move away from the identification of single measures
of HNC abstractions. This ontological choice allows us to
fully embrace the complexity of HNC, grasp the diversity of
“connecting” nature experiences that might influence it, and
appreciate how the relations between children’s HNC and nature
experiences jointly unfold across temporal, environmental, and
cultural contexts.
OVERVIEW OF CONCEPTS AND
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
We use the term significant nature situations (SNS) here, instead
of “connecting” nature experiences for two reasons. The first
reason is to be coherent with existing literature. Significant nature
experiences have long been used in the literature to denote
those life experiences that “connect” people to nature (Tanner,
1980; Chawla, 1998, 1999, 2006; Stern, 2000). Second, we use
nature situations, instead of nature experiences, to be consistent
with the embodied ontological approach described in section An
Embodied Approach to Human-Nature Connection and Child-
Nature-Connectedness.
In order to create a framework to assess child-nature-
connecting environments, we first need a list of criteria to
identify what a significant nature situation is, and distinguish it
from a non-significant one. It is self-evident that not all nature
situations are equally significant to promote children’s HNC. For
example, climbing a tree influences children’s HNC differently
than climbing a cactus. It is, however, unfeasible to use a list
of all nature activities that can possibly promote or hamper
children’s HNC to distinguish a significant nature situation from
a non-significant one. Such list would be an endless catalog of
all possible interactions with nature, including indoor and virtual
ones (Kahn et al., 2009). Instead, we need to identify what are
the distinguishing qualities reoccurring across different nature
situations that connect children to nature. In other words, we first
need to identify the qualities of significant nature situations. If we
assume for example that “enjoyment” is a hypothetical quality of
SNS, and that enjoyment can be assessed while a child climbs a
tree, then it means that the child is in a nature situation significant
for developing her HNC. Also, it is likely that such a nature
situation will change how she will perceive climbing trees in the
future. Thus, a framework to inform the assessment of significant
nature situations has to include qualities of SNS as much as their
relation to children’s HNC over time. There are, therefore, three
crucial components required for an assessment framework: it
should identify what the qualities of SNS are; what constitutes
children’s HNC; and provide an indication of their relation over
time. Consequently, we ask the following research questions:
RQ1. What are the qualities of significant nature situations?
RQ2. What constitutes children’s human-nature connection?
RQ3. How do qualities of significant nature situations and
children’s human-nature connection relate to each other
over time?
METHODOLOGY
Since the goal of the paper is to define a framework
useful to assess child-nature-connectedness of environments we
adopted a “sequential exploratory research design for instrument
development” (Creswell and Clark, 2007). As in our case,
this mixed-method methodology was required to develop and
test an instrument of classification that is not yet available
(Creswell and Clark, 2007). The empirical work is characterized
by two sequential phases. In phase 1 (qualitative), we performed
semi-structured interviews with a pool of professionals in the
field of connecting children to nature to inductively unveil
the qualities of SNS (RQ1), what constitutes children’s HNC
(RQ2), and how qualities of SNS and children’s HNC relate
to each other over time (RQ3). In phase 2 (quantitative),
we tested the results of phase 1 with an online survey that
we distributed among a broader pool of professionals in the
field of connecting children to nature. Here, we examined the
results for comprehensiveness, transferability, and practicality
and further explored the relations between qualities of SNS and
children’s HNC.
Why a Focus on Professionals’ Expertise?
Practitioners that aim to connect children to nature are an
international and very heterogeneous group of specialists who
have developed the ability to design, perform, and assess
nature-based activities for children throughout their professional
careers. We chose to focus on these professionals because their
practices, outlooks, and educational strategies are directly based
upon a holistic understanding of children’s HNC. Our research
is therefore based on professionals from a diverse number of
organizations and from a wide array of countries. Tapping
into their expertise ensured comprehensiveness of different
approaches and intents, sufficient transferability across children’s
ages and groups, and practical usability for a wide audience of
actors.
Additionally, focus on professional expertise aligned the
methodology of this investigation with the relational ontology of
embodied ecosystems. Understanding which qualities distinguish
significant nature situations from non-significant ones requires
the observation of children’s HNC as it unfolds in their
actions, or changes over long periods of time. Professionals
who observe children daily are capable of recognizing these
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Giusti et al. ACHUNAS: Assessing Children’s Nature Situations
patterns of change. We therefore relied on decades of
professional observations and insights, rather than attempting an
inevitably partial and potentially theoretically biased observation
ourselves.
Phase 1: Identification of HNC and
Qualities of SNS
We used semi-structured interviews to question practitioners (N
=26; male =5; female =21) in the field of connecting children
to nature in two consecutive steps. The first pool of practitioners
(N=11) was chosen to represent a wide range of professional
competencies and complementary conceptualizations of
children’s HNC. A second set of practitioners (N=15) was
selected from within a Swedish organization of nature preschools
(“I Ur och Skur”) whose outdoor-focused pedagogical approach
has contributed to increase interest and attachment to nature
in young children through direct nature interaction since 1983
(Westerlund et al., 2016). With this second pool of interviewees
(see Svane, 2017 for full report) we questioned, clarified, and
deepened previously acquired information. All interviewed
practitioners had between 5 and 40 (M=18) years of expertise
in the field so we refer to them in the paper as “professionals.”
All interviewees provided informed consent prior to the
interview. The interviews lasted 50 min on average and followed
interview guidelines that covered the three main areas of interest
identified by the RQs: what constitutes a “connecting” nature
experience for children, what the traits of a connected child
are, how children’s HNC changes over time. The interviews
were recorded, transcribed, and coded using Atlas.ti. Inductive
coding was performed for all interviews following the systematic
process for thematic analysis described by Braun and Clarke
(2006).
The resulting themes denoting qualities of SNS (RQ1),
children’s HNC (RQ2), and their relationship over time (RQ3)
were discussed between researchers and interpreted according
to the objectives and the relational approach of the paper.
We differentiated between themes when they were critically
dissimilar and aggregated them when their differences were
only of terminological nature. For example, when resulting
themes were positive or negative manifestations of the same
concept we aggregated them into an overarching theme. When
the resulting themes were overlapping we highlighted their
diversity whereas for nested themes we retained the most
general. These inductive results were used to formulate the
criteria of the assessment framework, which were then examined
further by additional professionals using an online survey in
phase 2.
Phase 2: Examining Phase 1 Results for
Comprehensiveness, Transferability, and
Practicality
The online survey was developed following the process identified
by Artino et al. (2014) to design high-quality survey scales.
With the survey, we tested the criteria obtained from phase
1 and examined their comprehensiveness, transferability, and
practicality. The survey was composed of four pages. The first
page provided information about the study and survey, and
ensured that all respondents gave informed consent for us
to anonymously utilize the results for research purposes. The
second page asked professionals for some descriptive information
(e.g., number of years of professional experience in the field, the
age of the children they work with). The third page addressed
relevance and comprehensiveness of the constituents of children’s
HNC obtained in phase 1. First, participants were asked if each
constituent indicated some form of children’s HNC using a five-
point Likert scale from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.”
Professionals were then asked how comprehensive the list of all
possible constituents of children’s HNC was, and subsequently
asked to rank all the constituents from the one children learn
first to the one children learn last (hereinafter called ordering
exercise). The fourth page examined the practicality and potential
transferability of these constituents across a multitude of actors.
In this exercise, we asked respondents to choose one constituent
of children’s HNC, to state a nature activity they perform in
their everyday work to significantly nurture that constituent,
and then to assess the reported significant nature activity rating
how important each quality of SNS obtained in phase 1 was
on a five-point Likert scale ranging from “not important” to
“essential” (hereinafter called assessment exercise). Professionals
were then asked to perform the same assessment exercise for
another constituent of children’s HNC, and were allowed to
further perform it a third time.
We chose the number of questions (14 were compulsory)
in the survey to be practical and simultaneously adequately
comprehensive to capture the complex essence of children’s SNS
and HNC. We favored simple English vocabulary to suit the
intended international audience of professionals working with
children’s HNC. Prior to releasing the survey, we conducted
expert validation with four colleagues for content validity;
eight cognitive interviews with additional professionals in the
field for response process validity; and performed two phases
of pilot testing (Artino et al., 2014). These practices ensured
that the professionals responding to the survey understood
and interpreted the final version of the questions and items
correctly. The survey was individually emailed to professionals
in the field of connecting children to nature in several
countries. In addition, we also asked participants for further
contacts.
We used R software for the analysis of the data. Specifically,
the package stats and likert for the statistical analysis, the
daisy function with Gower’s coefficient for the analyses of
dissimilarity, and the agnes and hclust functions of the
package cluster for hierarchical clustering and dendrogram
construction.
RESULTS
Descriptive Analysis of Survey
Respondents
The 275 respondents of the survey were from more than 200
different organizations. These organizations included primary,
secondary and high schools, forest and gardening schools,
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Giusti et al. ACHUNAS: Assessing Children’s Nature Situations
national parks, local and national organizations of environmental
conservation, municipalities, and international organizations
devoted to the cause of connecting children to nature. These
organizations and schools were located in Sweden, Finland,
Netherlands, US, England, Australia, Canada, Colombia, New
Zealand, Scotland, Wales, Spain, Norway, Northern Ireland,
Belgium, Mexico, Malaysia, India, Indonesia, Austria, Estonia,
and Portugal. Only the data from respondents that had stated that
connecting children to nature is either “very important” (N=
57) or “essential” (N=218) for their profession were analyzed.
This resulted in the removal of only 7 respondents suggesting
that the survey was correctly targeted. Of all respondents 93%
had at least 3 years of professional experience in the field of
connecting children to nature (M=15.5, Mdn =12, max =50,
SD =11), so, as with the interviewees in phase 1, we considered
the respondents of the survey “professionals” in the field.
Additionally, their heterogeneous professional competencies and
institutions covered the full-spectrum of potential insights into
what SNS are. Most professionals worked with several age groups
at the same time. Only few respondents (13%) worked with the
age group “0 to 1 years old,” 37% worked with “2 to 3 years old,”
most of them (80%) worked with the age group “4 to 7 years old,”
while 53% worked with “8 to 11 years old,” and 34% worked with
“12 to 18 years old.”
The results from the interviews and survey are presented
below alongside each other according to the research question
they jointly explored and tested.
RQ1: What Are the Qualities of Significant
Nature Situations?
From the inductive analysis of interviews with professionals we
obtained a list of qualities that characterizes a nature situation
with the potential to connect children to nature; that is, we
identified the qualities of SNS. Hence, a SNS for children
is characterized by one or more of the qualities listed in
Table 1.
During the assessment exercise in the survey, professionals
reported 399 significant nature activities. These significant nature
activities were often as simple as “pond dipping,” “lighting a
fire,” “bug hunting” and “playing in the forest and parks,” but
sometimes they were more complex; for example, “group sessions
to talk about the permaculture ethics of earth care, people care
and fair share” and “growing a vegetable garden using children’s
ideas.” All qualities of SNS were considered very important
and essential to assess at least some of the 399 significant
nature activities that the professionals reported (Figure 1). Of
all respondents, 67% found the list of qualities of SNS very
comprehensive, 7% fully comprehensive whereas no respondent
found the list not comprehensive.
In order to appreciate the differences and similarities in
how qualities of SNS were used to assess significant nature
activities we calculated a dissimilarity matrix using Gower’s
coefficients (min =0.26, Mdn =0.36, M=0.36, max =
0.52) and subsequently performed hierarchical clustering. The
dendrogram (agglomerative coefficient =0.30) and clustering
of the qualities of SNS at this level showed six separated
clusters (Figure 2). Significant nature activities characterized
by “thought-provocation,” “awe,” and “surprise,” were clustered
together and named “environmental epiphanies”; nature activities
characterized by “intimacy,” “mindfulness,” and “self-restoration”
were clustered together and named “restorative experiences”;
nature activities characterized by “creative expression,” “physical
activity,” “challenge,” “engagement of senses,” and “child-
driven” were clustered together and named “nature free play”;
nature activities characterized by “involvement of mentors,”
“structure/information,” and “social/cultural endorsement” were
clustered together and named “nature school.” The hierarchical
clustering showed that “entertainment” and “involvement of
animals” were categorically different qualities that seemed
to have intrinsic value and were independently clustered as
“entertaining” and “animal engaging.”
RQ2: What Constitutes Children’s HNC?
The main themes emerged from the inductive analysis of the
interviews showed that professionals recognized HNC as an
ability that children manifest when they perform certain actions
or show certain emotions. This was particularly evident when
professionals compared children who had been taking part in
nature activities for a long time with children that had just begun.
We selected few illustrative quotes to exemplify this point.
“We have one group that we have been working with for quite a
long time, and [.. . ] then I have started with a new group, and then
this thing is very clear [. . . ] they don’t all have this feeling about
how to think, or like: ‘before I start climbing this little mountain, I
need to look where to go. I can’t just go this way because it will be
too steep, I need to go around’.”
“A couple of the. . . stark differences we notice in our children [. . . ]
it takes them about 2 weeks on average to open up to the idea that
they can also get dirty and wash up after, and it becomes something
that’s not quite so scary for them.”
“The ones who have been through this, they are quicker and faster
and. . . they move differently. And that’s the same when we go ice-
skating or skiing, that the ones who have done this from when they
were little, they have something in their body that makes it easier
for them.”
The main themes obtained from the inductive analysis of
the interviews form a list of abilities that, according to the
professionals, were clear indicators of children’s HNC (Table 2).
We called these indicators abilities of human-nature connection.
Hence, a child more or less connected to nature is characterized
by one or more of the abilities of HNC listed in Table 2.
Across all abilities of HNC, at least 79% of survey respondents
agreed or strongly agreed that the abilities shown indicated some
form of HNC in children, whereas disagreement ranged from 5 to
8% (Figure 3). Furthermore, only 0.7% of the respondents stated
that the list of abilities of HNC was not comprehensive, whereas
all others stated that the list of abilities of HNC was either slightly
(5%), moderately (24%),very (63%), or fully comprehensive (7%).
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Giusti et al. ACHUNAS: Assessing Children’s Nature Situations
TABLE 1 | List of qualities of significant nature situations with associated brief descriptions.
Qualities of SNS Brief description
Entertainment Nature situations that are fun, joyful, amusing, or enjoyable.
Thought-provocation Nature situations that create new ways of conceiving human-nature interaction.
Intimacy Nature situations that are private or intimate and allow a personal experience with nature.
Awe Nature situations that are amazing, of overwhelming attraction, or mesmerizing, that create a “wow effect.”
Mindfulness Nature situations that grasp children’s focus and alertness, that make children “be in the flow.”
Surprise Nature situations that are unpredictable or unexpected. In these nature situations children’s line of thought is interrupted, and nature
draws their attention.
Creative expression Nature situations that involve arts, myths, stories, music, or role-play.
Physical activity Nature situations that require body movement or any form of physical activity.
Engagement of senses Nature situations that activate children’s senses (smell, touch, hearing, etc.)
Involvement of mentors Nature situations that involve persons, such as teachers, experts or relatives, who are capable of inspiring, encouraging, or leading the
nature experience for the child.
Involvement of animals Nature situations that involve interaction with animals.
Social/cultural endorsement Nature situations that involve positive peer pressure, support from significant others, social acceptance, or cultural reinforcement.
Structure/instructions Nature situations characterized by a set of rules that define the frame within which the child can act.
Child-driven Nature situations that are chosen by the child, child-initiated (children autonomously decide when to begin the nature activity), and
open-ended (children autonomously decide when to conclude the nature activity).
Challenge Nature situations in which children overcome psychologically or physically adverse conditions, such as fear or cold.
Self-restoration Nature situations of psychological, physical, or social relief. For example, relief from stress, fatigue, or gender stereotypes.
The descriptions presented here were also available to the respondents of the survey. The table can be read as, “A significant nature situation is characterized by (quality of SNS).”
RQ3: How Do Qualities of Significant
Nature Situations and Children’s
Human-Nature Connection Relate to Each
Other Over Time?
The inductive analysis of professionals’ interviews and survey
exercises showed that qualities of SNS relate to children’s
abilities of HNC through two interrelated dynamics of change:
routinization and progression.
Routinization fosters the development of children’s HNC
within abilities of HNC. It happens through reoccurring nature
activities with similar qualities of SNS, but possibly across
different socio-environmental situations. That is, the set of
relations existing between different spatial natural features, social
circumstances, and children’s abilities generates qualities of SNS
that develop certain abilities of HNC in depth. We selected few
illustrative quotes from the interviews to exemplify the dynamic
of routinization.
“It is practice that gives them that skill. [. . . ] With the skiing
for example, they can go downhill a hundred times and fall a
hundred times. And the 101st time, they stand the whole hill down.”
“3 things that make nature play impactful: right kind of play, right
kind of place, and the right kind of re-play [. . . ] is this frequency
thing [. . . ] basically that it needs to happen, not necessarily
everyday, but frequently.”
Progression is the development of children’s HNC across abilities
of HNC. That is, the set of relations existing between different
spatial natural features, social circumstances, and existing
children’s abilities generates qualities of SNS that allow children
to develop abilities of HNC that they did not have before
and broaden the development of their HNC; we selected few
illustrative quotes from the interviews to exemplify the dynamic
of progression.
“Also, to build a positive feeling for nature you need to establish this
sense of comfort already in young [children]- Being comfortable
that you’re able to, or dare to, carry your own backpack for
example. That is sort of the first step. And then as you get a little
bit older- To be able to walk a bit further away, maybe to another
place.”
“First; you have to get accustomed to nature somehow, explore and
discover, before you can play. [. . . ] Then you can start becoming
interested in. . . Well, maybe practicing your agility by jumping
from rocks or climbing tree logs or something.”
“[In a new place], you have to sort of start over, from this first phase
[i.e., being comfortable].”
In order to fully appreciate the progression of children’s abilities
of HNC, we use a weighted average to rank the results from the
ordering exercise in the survey. “Feeling comfortable in natural
spaces” was found to be the first ability of HNC that children
learn and “being one with nature” the last one (Figure 4). We also
calculated a dissimilarity matrix on the results of the ordering
exercise (min =0.20, Mdn =0.37, M =0.41, max =0.75),
on which we performed hierarchical clustering to understand if
the progression of abilities of HNC had clusters of development.
Both the weighted averages and the dendrogram (agglomerative
coefficient =0.44) showed three clear clusters of abilities of HNC
(Figure 4). The first cluster was defined by children’s abilities of
“feeling comfortable in natural spaces” and “being curious about
nature,” so we termed it “being IN nature.” The second cluster
is defined by children’s abilities of “acting in natural spaces,”
“feeling attached to natural spaces,” “reading natural spaces,”
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Giusti et al. ACHUNAS: Assessing Children’s Nature Situations
FIGURE 1 | Results from the questions on qualities of SNS in the survey. Top: percentages of importance for all the qualities of SNS that professionals had used in
assessing the significant nature activities they reported to perform with children. Bottom: professionals’ responses on how comprehensive the list of qualities of SNS
was for the assessment exercise.
“knowing about nature,” and “recalling memories with nature,”
so we termed it “being WITH nature.” The last cluster is defined
by children’s abilities of “caring about nature”, “taking care of
nature,” and “being one with nature,” so we termed this cluster
“being FOR nature.”
The dynamics between the qualities of SNS and children’s
abilities of HNC have been further explored using the results
of the assessment exercise performed in the survey. This
showed that in order to teach children specific abilities of
HNC, professionals used nature activities that had different
configurations of qualities of SNS (Figure 5). For example,
professionals that intended to teach children to be capable of
“being IN nature” performed nature activities that were mostly
“child-driven,” characterized by high “engagement of senses”,
“awe,” “physical activity,” but with little “structure/instructions.”
Conversely, professionals who aimed to teach children to be
capable of “being FOR nature” performed nature activities
that were more characterized by “thought-provocation,”
“social/cultural endorsement” and “structure/instructions” and
less by “physical activity” or “entertainment.”
One-way ANOVA tests were conducted to compare the
statistical influence of qualities of SNS on the three phases of
HNC progression: “being IN nature,” “being WITH nature,” and
“being FOR nature.” The results showed that many qualities of
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Giusti et al. ACHUNAS: Assessing Children’s Nature Situations
FIGURE 2 | Dendogram obtained from the hierarchical analysis of dissimilarity of qualities of SNS using Gower’s coefficient with height coefficients. The clusters of
“entertainment” and “involvement of animals” had been independently clustered as “entertaining” and “animal engaging.” The remaining qualities of SNS were
clustered into four different macro categories of nature situations: environmental epiphanies, restorative experiences, nature free play, and nature school.
TABLE 2 | List of abilities of human-nature connection with the associated brief descriptions.
Abilities of HNC Brief description
Feeling comfortable in natural spaces The child demonstrates ease in natural spaces and feels comfortable with natural elements in the outdoors (e.g., dirt, mud, rain,
or the sun).
Reading natural spaces The child is able to see the possibilities for action in natural spaces that are not purposefully designed by man.
Acting in natural spaces The child is able to perform activities in nature, for example, nature playing, camping, or outdoor sports in nature.
Feeling attached to natural spaces The child shows a sense of belonging to specific natural spaces, to which they feel part of.
Knowing about nature The child demonstrates knowledge of animals, plants, and ecological dynamics.
Being curious about nature The child shows interest and motivation in exploring nature.
Recalling memories with nature The child is able to recall past nature experiences and tell stories of lived experiences with nature.
Taking care of nature The child is able to be responsible for nature and feels empowered to act for the wellbeing of nature.
Caring about nature The child is able to feel care, concern, sensitivity, empathy, and respect for nature.
Being one with nature The child is able to identify with nature and has a sense of profound personal attachment to nature that can be described as
spiritual. Love for nature, humbleness in relation to nature, and assuming to be a small part of the immensity of nature are
manifestations of this ability.
The descriptions presented here were also available to the respondents of the survey. The table can be read as, “A child connected to nature is capable of (abilities of HNC).”
SNS were statistically different for different phases of abilities
of HNC; that is, “entertainment” [F(2,396) =6.811, p=0.001],
“thought-provocation” [F(2,396) =4.665, p=0.009], “intimacy”
[F(2,396) =3.85, p=0.02), “awe” [F(2,396) =3.841, p=0.02],
“surprise” [F(2,396) =8.384, p=0.0002], “physical activity”
[F(2,396) =0.467, p=0.004], “social/cultural endorsement”
[F(2,396) =6.218, p=0.002], “structure/instructions” [F(2,396)
=6.628, p=0.001], “engagement of senses” [F(2,396) =3.261,
p=0.04] and “child-driven” [F(2,396) =5.916, p=0.003]. For
these qualities of SNS, Tukey post-hoc tests showed that there
were significant differences between teaching children to be in
or with nature and being for nature (Table 3). For instance,
nature activities used in teaching children to be for nature
were significantly less characterized by the qualities of SNS of
“entertainment,” “physical activity,” and “child-driven,” but more
defined by “thought-provocation,” “structure/instruction,” and
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Giusti et al. ACHUNAS: Assessing Children’s Nature Situations
FIGURE 3 | Results from the questions on abilities of HNC in the survey. Top: how much professionals agreed that the list of abilities of human-nature connection
indicated children’s HNC. Bottom: professionals’ responses on how comprehensive the list of was to represent all abilities that indicate children’s HNC.
“social/cultural endorsement.” Calculating Cohen’s d on such
differences also showed that the effect sizes were above average
for educational research (d>0.4) (Hattie, 2008) meaning that
certain qualities of SNS were considerably more, and some less,
important to nurture specific phases of HNC progression.
DISCUSSING ACHUNAS: A FRAMEWORK
TO ASSESS WHERE AND HOW CHILDREN
CONNECT WITH NATURE
The results shown in this paper form the Assessment framework
for Children’s Human Nature Situations (ACHUNAS)
(Figure 6). ACHUNAS is composed of the list of qualities
of SNS (Table 1); the list of children’s abilities of HNC (Table 2);
and three guiding principles (see section Guiding Principles of
ACHUNAS). The lists of qualities of SNS and abilities of HNC
outline what to assess to quantify or qualify the child-nature-
connecting property of an environment, without defining how to
perform the assessment itself. In line with transactional research,
ACHUNAS avoids the rigid standardization of measurements
across settings, and it solely highlights patterns of regularities
across SNS and children’s HNC (Altman and Rogoff, 1987).
ACHUNAS is intended to be a flexible framework that allows
practitioners and researchers to choose the assessment strategies,
goals, and methods appropriate to their socio-environmental
context. To allow the greatest flexibility while maintain integrity,
three guiding principles are included as part of the framework.
These principles give the boundaries of what SNS are, what
children’s HNC is, and how they relate to each other over
time and are included as part of the framework. Together, the
lists of qualities of SNS and abilities of HNC, and the three
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Giusti et al. ACHUNAS: Assessing Children’s Nature Situations
FIGURE 4 | Results from the ordering exercise in the survey showing the progression of abilities of HNC in time. Top: each stacked column shows the percentages of
professionals that placed as first, second, third, etc., or last each learnt ability of HNC. Bottom: the upside-down dendogram obtained from the hierarchical analysis
of dissimilarity with height coefficients. The three obtained phases of HNC progression are also shown: being IN Nature, being WITH nature, and being FOR nature.
guiding principles form a comprehensive, transferable, and
practical framework to guide the assessment of child-nature-
connecting environments. Thus, ACHUNAS does not prescribe
a set of methods to apply for a specific assessment, but it is a
framework that outlines the criteria to apply when assessing
child-nature-connectedness. ACHUNAS sets the framework
to guide the assessment of where and how children connect to
nature, but it does not impose a standard set of tools to measure
child-nature-connectedness across all socio-environmental
contexts.
Guiding Principles of ACHUNAS
This paper identified three crucial questions to address
the problem of assessing child-nature-connectedness
of environments: “what are the qualities of significant
nature situations?” (RQ1), “what constitutes children’s
human-nature connection?” (RQ2), and “how do qualities
of significant nature situations and children’s human-
nature connection relate to each other over time?” (RQ3).
Below, we discuss the results that answer each of these
questions with a principle. The three resulting principles
set the boundaries of the assessment framework and guide
how it should be interpreted and operationalized in the
future.
Principle 1: Significant Nature Situations Are Various
and with Differing Consequences for Children’s HNC
Professionals identified sixteen qualities that make a nature
situation significant for children’s HNC (Table 1). Nature
situations can be significant for children’s HNC simply
because they are entertaining, because they involve a personal
engagement with animals, or because children feel free to
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Giusti et al. ACHUNAS: Assessing Children’s Nature Situations
FIGURE 5 | Configurations of qualities of SNS for the three phases of HNC progression (i.e. being IN nature, being WITH nature, being FOR nature). Qualities of SNS
that are significantly different between phases of HNC progression are marked according to the following legend: ***p<0.001; **p<0.01; *p<0.05; “.”: p<0.1.
engage in physical or artistic activities that activate their
senses. However, it is most likely that several qualities
of SNS co-occur in one significant nature situation. The
configurations of qualities of SNS produced by the hierarchical
clustering have shown the potential co-existence of six
different kinds of SNS similar to some that have already
been recognized in academia (Figure 2). Thought-provoking,
awesome, and surprising SNS constituting “environmental
epiphanies” are identified in the literature as “‘aha’ moments
[.. .] that shift the fundamental self-nature relationship”
(Vining and Merrick, 2012, 1). Intimate, mindful, and self-
restoring SNS constituting “restorative experiences” have a
long academic history (Hartig et al., 1991; Kaplan, 1995)
and are for example considered fundamental for healthy
urban living (Hartig and Kahn, 2016). SNS characterized
by “involvement of mentors,” “structure/information,”
and “social/cultural endorsement” are equally recognized
in environmental education (Nazir and Pedretti, 2016).
Consequently, assessing the child-nature-connectedness
property of environments implies assessing a variety of
different SNS.
It is important to note that the diversity of SNS comes
with a diversity of implications for children’s HNC. Different
configurations of qualities of SNS require and nurture children’s
HNC differently. Results from the survey have shown that the
nature activities that professionals performed to teach children
to care, take care, and be one with nature (i.e., to be FOR
nature) are characterized by configurations of qualities of SNS
that are statistically different from the other phases of HNC
progression (see Figure 5,Table 3). As different qualities of SNS
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Giusti et al. ACHUNAS: Assessing Children’s Nature Situations
TABLE 3 | Results of Tukey post-hoc test and Cohen’s d for the qualities of SNS that were significantly different between the three phases of HNC progression (i.e., being
IN nature, being WITH nature, being FOR nature).
Qualities of SNS Being IN
nature
Being WITH
nature
Being IN
nature
Being FOR
nature
Being WITH
nature
Being FOR
nature
Min ±SDin
Nin =144
Mwith ±SDwith
Nwith =162
Min ±SDin
Nin =144
Mfor ±SDfor
Nfor =93
Mwith ±SDwith
Nwith =162
Mfor ±SDfor
Nfor =93
Entertainment 2.1 ±1.37 2.06 ±1.26 2.1 ±1.37 1.52 ±1.26 2.06 ±1.26 1.52 ±1.26
CI0.95 = −0.7, −0.17** d= −0.44 CI0.95 = −0.69, −0.17** d= −0.043
Thought-provocation 2.58 ±1.2 2.42 ±1.16 2.58 ±1.2 2.88 ±1.02 2.42 ±1.16 2.88 ±1.02
CI0.95 =0.16, 0.67** d=0.41
Awe 2.72 ±1.2 2.46 ±1.16 2.72 ±1.2 2.29 ±1.3 2.46 ±1.16 2.29 ±1.3
CI0.95 = −0.61, −0.08* d= −0.35
Intimacy 2.36 ±1.16 2.05 ±1.36 2.36 ±1.16 1.96 ±1.3 2.05 ±1.36 1.96 ±1.3
CI0.95 = −0.59, −0.07* d= −0.33
Surprise 2.48 ±1.18 2.22 ±1.17 2.48 ±1.18 1.83 ±1.35 2.22 ±1.17 1.83 ±1.35
CI0.95 = −0.79, −0.26*** d= −0.52 CI0.95 = −0.57, −0.06* d= −0.32
Physical activity 2.4 ±1.3 2.69 ±1.33 2.4 ±1.3 2.13 ±1.27 2.69 ±1.33 2.13 ±1.27
CI0.95 = −0.69, −0.17** d= −0.43
Engagement of senses 3.2 ±0.97 3.23 ±1.09 3.2 ±0.97 2.9 ±1.05 3.23 ±1.09 2.9 ±1.05
CI0.95 = −0.56, −0.05* d= −0.31
Social/Cultural endorsement 2.01 ±1.32 2.19 ±1.24 2.01 ±1.32 2.58 ±1.15 2.19 ±1.24 2.58 ±1.15
CI0.95 =0.19, 0.72*** d= −0.45 CI0.95 =0.07, 0.58* d= −0.32
Structure/Instructions 1.86 ±1.23 1.86 ±1.21 1.86 ±1.23 2.38 ±1.09 1.86 ±1.21 2.38 ±1.09
CI0.95 =0.18, 0.71*** d=0.44 CI0.95 =0.19, 0.70* d=0.45
Child-driven 2.88 ±1.1 2.87 ±1.12 2.88 ±1.1 2.42 ±1.16 2.87 ±1.12 2.42 ±1.16
CI0.95 = −0.67, −0.15** d= −0.41 CI0.95 = −0.65, −0.14** d= −0.40
Cells with significant results (p <0.05) with effect size d >0.40 are highlighted. Legend for significance levels: *p≤0.05; **p≤0.01; ***p≤0.001.
are used to promote different abilities of HNC it follows that some
configurations of qualities of SNS are more important than others
in developing certain abilities of HNC. During the assessment
of where and how children connect to nature it is, therefore,
important to remember that SNS are various and with differing
consequences for HNC.
Principle 2: Children’s Human-Nature Connection Is a
Complex Embodied Ability
The professionals interviewed described HNC as a constellation
of abilities of the mind and body that children learn. For
example, professionals stated that children show HNC when
they are “curious about nature”; which is visible in children
when they show desire to know about nature as well as when
they show the desire to physically explore natural spaces. Most
abilities of HNC listed here simultaneously embody both actions
and emotions, and are also embodied in particular socio-
environmental contexts. During the interviews and in response
to the survey, professionals widely remarked that the abilities
that shape children’s HNC are not only in relation to “nature”
as an abstract concept, but they are also importantly related to
natural physical spaces. Children’s HNC exists when children
are capable of “feeling comfortable in natural spaces,” “acting in
natural spaces,” “reading natural spaces,” and ultimately “feeling
attached to natural spaces.” These abilities of HNC show that
children’s HNC is rooted to tangible natural environments, and
potentially specific ecological attributes, going beyond an abstract
conceptualization of “nature” often used to assess people’s
relation with nature (Ives et al., 2017). Additionally, children’s
HNC shows attributes of complexity. The existence of different
phases of HNC progression (Figure 4) and their differing
relations to qualities of SNS (Figure 5) suggest that children’s
HNC as a whole cannot be solely understood as the sum of
their individual abilities of HNC. Different configurations of
abilities of HNC seem to play an important role in characterizing
children’s HNC as a whole. The second guiding principle to
support the use of ACHUNAS is, therefore, that children’s HNC
is a complex embodied ability.
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Giusti et al. ACHUNAS: Assessing Children’s Nature Situations
This principle answers the call of many in environmental
psychology to integrate extra-psychological factors in models that
aim to determine pro-environmental behaviors (Gifford, 2014;
Gifford and Nilsson, 2014; Steg et al., 2014). Unlike previous
academic work that presents mono-dimensional or disembodied
understandings of the relationship that exists between people
and nature, this paper demonstrates that professionals conceive
children’s HNC as a complex set of abilities embodied within
mind, body, culture, and the environment. Despite socio-
environmental contexts being considered obvious antecedents
to encourage or constrain pro-environmental behaviors (Steg
et al., 2014) academics have not yet systematically scrutinized
their impact in encouraging pro-environmental behaviors (Steg
and Vlek, 2009). The relational approach used here to develop
ACHUNAS offers an alternative starting point that embraces and
values professionals’ embodied perspectives of children’s HNC.
Principle 3: Children’s Human-Nature Connection
Progresses Over Time through Diverse Nature
Routines
The thematic analysis of professionals’ interviews showed that
children’s HNC progresses dynamically over time through
routinization and progression like most other human abilities. In
the survey, professionals suggested a model of development for
children’s HNC that begins with “feeling comfortable in natural
spaces” and “being curious about nature,” and ends with “caring
about nature” and “being one with nature” (Figure 4). The related
hierarchical clustering showed three consecutive phases of HNC
progression: being in nature, being with nature, and being for
nature. That means that before being able to feel and act for
nature (3rd phase) a child has to develop over time the ability
to be in (1st phase) and with nature (2nd phase). In other words,
before feeling care or concern for the environment, and before
feeling responsible and motivated to act for it, a child has to
at least feel at ease and comfortable in the natural elements of
the outdoors. Children’s ability to just enjoy and being curious
about natural spaces is therefore a gateway to more profound
forms of human nature relationships, but the progression across
such abilities of HNC cannot be considered linear. Since these
abilities are embodied in specific socio-environmental contexts,
their progression is also context-dependent. As one of the
interviewees stated “[In a new place], you have to sort of
start over, from this first phase.” The three phases of HNC
progression can indeed be seen as an indication of multiple
states of equilibrium. This also implies that the development
of children’s HNC is likely to be characterized by potential
threshold effects between one phase of HNC progression and
another. For instance, only when a child is comfortable in
nature in several social-environmental contexts can s/he then
begin to know how to read specific environmental features.
Abilities of HNC can indeed progress in depth (e.g., a child
can be more or less curious about nature) and breadth (e.g.,
child can be curious about a garden, but not about a forest),
and can nurture one another (e.g., a child who can be curious
about a natural space might begin to feel attached to it). The
third guiding principle to support the use of ACHUNAS is,
therefore, that children’s HNC does not grow linearly, but it
progresses dynamically over time through the routinization of
diverse qualities of SNS.
Current literature proposes models of development for
HNC that grow linearly in independent and pre-identified
psychological traits (Tam, 2013). The amount of time spent in a
space is mentioned throughout the literature on sense of place
as the most consistent predictor of attachment to it (Lewicka,
2011) and, similarly, the amount of time spent in nature is one
of the most significant predictor of emotional affinity toward
nature (Kals et al., 1999) and a crucial condition of any changes
in children’s HNC (Schultz and Tabanico, 2007). However, we
are not familiar with any models that have explored how HNC
develops and what is required for its progression over time.
The development of children’s HNC requires the reoccurrence
of different qualities of SNS to progress. That is, children’s HNC
requires diverse nature routines provided by a wide variety
of environmental features and by the involvement of diverse
actors, collaborators, and institutions. Establishing significant
and diverse nature routines responds to concerns in modern
environmental education (Chawla and Cushing, 2007; Nazir
and Pedretti, 2016), environmental conservation (Miller, 2005;
Soga et al., 2015), and sustainable socio-ecological urban design
(Colding and Barthel, 2013; Giusti et al., 2014; Marcus et al.,
2016; Beery et al., 2017). As one interviewee highlighted: “3 things
that make nature play impactful: right kind of play, right kind
of place, and the right kind of re-play [. . .] is this frequency
thing.”
Use and Usefulness of ACHUNAS
The lists of abilities of HNC and qualities of SNS outline what
to quantify or qualify when assessing child-nature-connecting
environments. Similar to the lists of qualities used to assess
the “child-friendliness” property of environments (Kyttä, 2006;
Broberg et al., 2013), or the ANGELO framework used to assess
the “obesogenicity” property of environments (Swinburn et al.,
1999; Kirk et al., 2010), ACHUNAS is a framework that outlines
a list-based set of criteria with the purpose of assessing the
child-nature-connectedness property of environments. The lists
of qualities of SNS and abilities of HNC give practitioners and
researchers a frame of reference to identify where there are SNS
and how they affect children’s HNC. Eventually, the criteria
proposed in ACHUNAS can be quantified using, for example,
Likert scale surveys or other psychometric measurements. This
would allow users to quantify the degree of “significance”
of nature situations. Simultaneously, ACHUNAS is useful to
understand what kind of SNS exist in the everyday landscapes
and routines of children. The diversity of qualities of SNS and
abilities of HNC listed provides the possibility to qualify the
landscape in terms of the kind of SNS provided. For example,
the green infrastructure might allow entertaining situations,
but not nature situations that are child-driven or involving
animals.
The above properties make ACHUNAS useful to assess, first,
where significant nature situations are, and, second, how children
connect to nature. Below, we give two hypothetical examples of
assessments that operationalize ACHUNAS to exemplify its use
in assessing child-nature-connecting environments.
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Giusti et al. ACHUNAS: Assessing Children’s Nature Situations
Hypothetical Examples of Assessments Using
ACHUNAS
ACHUNAS can be used, for example, to assess the extent
and type of “extinction of experiences” that many authors also
believe undermines children’s well-being (Soga and Gaston, 2016;
Soga et al., 2016) and interest in nature conservation (Miller,
2005; Samways, 2007; Finch, 2008). Such assessments could
be performed by using participatory observations, interviews,
or PPGIS methodologies to examine which qualities of SNS
exist, and which do not, in the everyday landscape of children.
As an example, take an urban park in which children are
freely allowed to play. Each item in the lists of qualities of
SNS can be independently assessed according to the nature
situations that are available in the park (see the assessment
example “playing in the park” in Figure 6). In this hypothetical
example, the evaluator has spent time in the park performing
participatory observations of children describing nature activities
with high levels of “entertainment,” but low levels of “thought-
provocation.” Overall, the observations show that the nature
situations available in this park are mostly characterized by the
qualities of “child-driven” and “physical” activities with high
“engagement of senses.” The evaluator then decides to interview
children to understand their ability of “feeling comfortable in
natural spaces,” “being curious about nature,” and so on. Once
completed, the assessment provides the evaluator with useful
information about what kind of nature experiences exist in the
park, and, importantly, which ones are missing. In this example,
the evaluator might conclude that organized activities and the
introduction of animals might further nurture children’s ability of
“knowing about nature,” or “feeling attached to natural spaces.”
In the above example, ACHUNAS specifies the list of criteria
that the evaluator should follow to assess the environment, but
the methods to do this (e.g., participatory observations and
interviews) are chosen by the evaluator. For a more complete
assessment, the evaluator might also consider principle 3 of
ACHUNAS (i.e., children’s HNC progresses over time through
diverse nature routines) and assess how frequently children visit
the park and how long they have exposure to nature activities
for, or perform the same assessment for all the parks of a
neighborhood or a city.
A second example of how ACHUNAS can be used
is in the assessment of educational nature activities. This
type of implementation would be particularly useful to
educational programs connecting children to nature (see the
assessment example “gardening” in Figure 6). Qualitative and/or
quantitative methods such as interviews, observations, and
questionnaires could be applied to study the presence and extent
of the different qualities of SNS and abilities of HNC. In this
hypothetical example, the project aims to teach children how to
grow their own food, and researchers use a questionnaire to ask
practitioners to rank how important each of the qualities of SNS
are when children garden (this example has strong similarities
with the assessment exercise performed by professionals in
the survey). The final assessment shows that while gardening
“thought-provocation” and “social/cultural endorsement” are
high, but that “entertainment” is low. By interviewing the
children, researchers also find that despite children being
able to “take care of nature” their level of ability to “be
curious about nature” while gardening is low. Researchers
would conclude that gardening, as it is performed by this
educational program, is likely to be insufficiently entertaining
to nurture children’s curiosity about nature. Researchers might
then recommend that practitioners introduce an element of
play during gardening activities, or to foster children’s sense of
belonging to the garden by making them choose a name for
different sections of the garden. As in the previous example,
ACHUNAS provides the lists of qualities of SNS and abilities
of HNC which should be assessed, and the researchers select
the method in which to do so (e.g., questionnaires and
interviews). Using ACHUNAS in this way allows practitioners
to develop more holistic and comprehensive nature activities,
and it helps to bridge the gap between theory and practice that
constitute a major obstacle in current environmental education
(Chawla and Cushing, 2007; Finch, 2008; Nazir and Pedretti,
2016).
Comprehensiveness, Transferability, and Practicality
Of the 275 professionals responding to the survey (from more
than 200 organizations in 22 countries), 74% considered the list
of sixteen qualities of SNS to be “very” or “fully comprehensive”
to assess all the qualities of nature activities that connect
children to nature. During the survey, every single quality of
SNS listed was considered “very important” or “essential” to
assess a considerable percentage of nature activities that have
the potential to connect children to nature; from 35% for
“involvement of animals” to 78% for “engagement of senses”
(Figure 1). The same can be said for the list of abilities that
constitute children’s HNC. The list of abilities of HNC was
found to be at least “somewhat comprehensive” by 99.3% of
the professionals responding our survey with the majority of
professionals (63%) stating that it was “very comprehensive.”
Additionally, a large majority of respondents agreed that every
single ability of HNC listed indicated some form of connection
to nature in children; from 79% agreeing with “being one with
nature” to 92% agreeing with “being curious about nature”
(Figure 3). These results, the mixed-method methodology, and
the heterogeneous group of professionals ensure that the lists of
qualities of SNS and abilities of HNC generated in this paper are
sufficiently comprehensive of all relations that indicate children’s
HNC, transferable across different children and cultures, and can
be practically implemented by practitioners and researchers in
order to identify where children’s SNS are.
Limitations of ACHUNAS
We identify three limitations of ACHUNAS to assess child-
nature-connecting environments. The first limitation is the
completeness and generalizability of ACHUNAS. 63% of
professionals found the abilities of HNC “very comprehensive”
and 67% of them thought the same for qualities of SNS, but
only 7% of them found these lists to be “fully comprehensive.”
This shows that ACHUNAS might not yet integrate all the
qualities that can categorize an environment as more or less
child-nature-connecting and, therefore, the lists of qualities of
SNS and abilities of HNC require formal validation. Further
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Giusti et al. ACHUNAS: Assessing Children’s Nature Situations
FIGURE 6 | Assessment framework for Children’s Human Nature Situations (ACHUNAS). ACHUNAS comprises the list of qualities of SNS, the list of children’s abilities
of human-nature connection, and three guiding principles. The figure shows the hypothetical assessment of two SNS (playing in the park and gardening) with different
configurations of qualities of SNS and abilities of HNC.
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Giusti et al. ACHUNAS: Assessing Children’s Nature Situations
research is required to test the lists for convergence or
divergence. For generalizability, cross-cultural assessments are
needed to understand if certain qualities of SNS and abilities
of HNC are more suitable than others to assess specific socio-
cultural contexts. Despite having tested ACHUNAS on a very
international and heterogeneous group of respondents, the
framework lacks the contributions of non-English speaking
professionals and the potentially valuable input from indigenous
communities.
Second, because of the nature of ACHUNAS, the framework
does not suggest which method is the most suitable to assess
each item in the lists. ACHUNAS highlights what to assess,
but it does not provide guidance on how to assess child-
nature-connectedness. Comparability across assessments that
operationalize ACHUNAS with different methodologies might,
therefore, be limited. Defining standard operationalizations
of ACHUNAS through trandisciplinary collaborations would
greatly increase the comparability of results across different
socio-environmental contexts.
Third, ACHUNAS is a framework built upon professionals’
understanding of children’s HNC. The results are therefore a
representation of a multitude of adults’ perspectives and lack the
direct input of children’s insights. In order to further improve
the validity of ACHUNAS as a framework, interviews of children
and self-reporting methodologies performed with children can
be implemented to better integrate children’s perspectives into
the ACHUNAS framework. In pursuing this endeavor, we also
see the potential contribution of children with differing socio-
demographic backgrounds.
Future Research Directions for
Child-Nature-Connecting Environments
We identified three future research directions that have
great potential to promote the design of nature-connecting
human habitats or to inform educational curricula that
promote children’s HNC. The most obvious is operationalizing
ACHUNAS to assess where and how children connect to nature.
Implementing standard operationalizations of ACHUNAS would
allow understanding which relations of children’s abilities of
HNC and socio-environmental features afford qualities of SNS.
This would be a further step forward in unveiling the ecological
properties that can categorize an environment as more or less
child-nature-connecting. Furthermore, such knowledge would
be a stepping stone toward the design of nature-connecting
human habitats.
A second area of research of fundamental importance is
the analysis of interdependencies between qualities of SNS and
abilities of HNC. The fundamental unit of analysis in ACHUNAS
is at the confluence of children’s abilities of HNC, qualities of
SNS, and the socio-environmental context. The results shown
above already indicated that certain configurations of qualities
of SNS significantly relate to certain abilities of HNC (see
Table 3). However, the current understanding of these linkages
are preliminary and they lack temporal dimensions such as
frequency or duration. A better understanding of the effects that
routinized sets of qualities of SNS have on children’s abilities
of HNC would better inform the design of nature-connecting
human habitats as well as pedagogical curricula that aim to
connect children to nature.
Lastly, it is plausible that children’s HNC may vary not just
in relation to SNS and nature routines, but also with respect
to the child’s cognitive, emotional, moral, and physical stages
of development. Although this has not been the goal of this
paper, we recognize that studying the progression of HNC
in relation to children’s stages of development is a promising
area of research that could directly promote comprehensive
and holistic curricula to nurture children’s HNC. For the sake
of facilitating such academic endeavor, we believe that Piaget’s
stages of development (Piaget, 1960), Vygotsky’s theory of Zones
of Proximal Development (Chaiklin, 2003), Bronfenbrenner’s
theory of child development (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), situated
and social learning (Lave and Wenger, 1991), and embodied
cognition (Chemero, 2009) might be useful theories to investigate
some of these unknowns.
Implications for Sustainable Urban Design
and Environmental Education
The results of this study have obvious implications for
the practice of sustainable urban design and environmental
education. It is common for urban green infrastructure to
be promoted and developed for biophysical management, e.g.,
stormwater management, flood control, urban cooling, reduction
in carbon emissions etc., but its role in the development of
children’s HNC has been so far largely ignored. For example,
access rights, spatial accessibility, ecological and biological
diversity are just some of the variables of the green infrastructure
that can promote children’s nature routines and their HNC;
all of which are already intentionally designed in the human
habitat. Whether intentional or incidental, recurring experiences
of nature situated in the everyday habitat of children are
opportunities to develop their abilities of HNC (Giusti et al.,
2014; Marcus et al., 2016; Beery et al., 2017; Samuelsson et al.,
2017). Nature-based solutions provide direct benefits for public
health, improve living conditions, and build resilience to climate
and environmental change (Colding and Barthel, 2013; Hartig
and Kahn, 2016). The results of this study show that they
can also be considered in sustainable urban design for the
transgenerational establishment of sustainable futures.
As environmental educators have already acknowledged,
promoting children’s HNC also means facilitating frequent
nature activities and the results of this study confirm this
position (Chawla and Cushing, 2007; Finch, 2008; Nazir and
Pedretti, 2016). ACHUNAS offers the possibility to assess the
significance of such frequent nature activities, to compare them,
to identify which phase of HNC progression children are in, or
to better tailor nature activities to suit the intended educational
ability of HNC. In so doing, ACHUNAS is a first step toward
the assessment of best practices to nurture children’s HNC
across organizations, cultures, and geographical locations. More
broadly, assessing nature activities using ACHUNAS provides a
preliminary form of curricula evaluation when the pedagogical
goal is to connect children to nature. Conclusive monitoring
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Giusti et al. ACHUNAS: Assessing Children’s Nature Situations
methods developed from the ACHUNAS framework would
allow reliable comparison within and across programs and the
identification of discrepancies between intended and effective
outcomes. This is a stepping stone to understand if such
programs have potential to nurture future sustainable personal
and collective behaviors. In summary, we believe ACHUNAS is a
step forward in creating a reliable pedagogical curriculum capable
of connecting children to nature.
ACHUNAS is a starting point for cross-fertilization between
different disciplines interested in child-nature-connectedness.
The academic literature on HNC has been systematically divided
into epistemological silos (Ives et al., 2017), but the embodied
approach to HNC used for ACHUNAS provides fertile ground to
integrate, extend, and apply these different branches of empirical
evidence. Several abilities of HNC in ACHUNAS such as “feeling
comfortable in,” “feeling attached to,” “recalling memories in,”
and “caring about” natural spaces are also founding elements of
sense of place literature in human geography (Hernández et al.,
2007; Lewicka, 2011). On the other hand, “knowing about nature”
and to an extent “being one with it” are recognized components
of modern environmental education (Nazir and Pedretti, 2016).
The embodied nature of ACHUNAS allows these established
disciplinary grounds to be brought together and set side by side
with professionals’ understanding of children’s HNC. The use of
ACHUNAS will allow these disciplines to gain further practical
application and provide practitioners with the possibility to draw
on the solidity of peer-reviewed literature.
CONCLUSION
In this study, through the use of inductive thematic analysis and
a practitioner survey we identified and tested three components
of an Assessment framework for Children’s Human Nature
Situations that we called ACHUNAS (Figure 6). First, we
identified 16 qualities of SNS that characterize a nature situation
with the potential to “connect” children to nature. Second, we
documented a list of 10 abilities of human-nature connection that
expresses the nuances of children’s human-nature connection.
Third, we defined three principles that frame the applicability of
these lists: (1) significant nature situations are various and with
differing consequences for children’s human-nature connection;
(2) children’s human-nature connection is a complex embodied
ability; and (3) children’s human-nature connection progresses
over time through diverse nature routines. Together, these
findings form a comprehensive framework that outline what
to quantify or qualify when assessing “child-nature connecting”
environments.
Questions like “where children connect with nature?” and
“what kind of nature experiences are missing from cities?” are
central to the design of nature-connecting human habitats as
much as to the generation of sustainable futures. ACHUNAS is
sufficiently comprehensive, transferable, and practical to provide
a starting point to answer these questions and to guide the
assessment of where and how children connect to nature. It
can be operationalized to assess the extent and typology of
“extinction of experience” and inspire the design of nature-
based human habitats that also connect children and people to
nature. Similarly, it can be used to evaluate curricula that aim to
connect children to nature, providing useful information to such
educational programs. Overall, ACHUNAS is a transdisciplinary
framework that allows cross-fertilization and integration of
knowledge across different academic disciplines and makes it
useful to practitioners interested in promoting child-nature-
connecting environments and children’s HNC. In conclusion,
ACHUNAS provides a starting point to classify a social-ecological
system as more or less child-nature-connecting.
ETHICS STATEMENT
This study was carried out in accordance with the
recommendations “ESPA Ethics Principles and Procedure”
produced by the Directorate of the Ecosystem Services for
Poverty Alleviation, with written informed consent from
all subjects. All subjects gave written informed consent in
accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The protocol was
approved by the ethical committee at the Stockholm Resilience
Centre.
AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
MG: Work conception, research design, data collection, data
analysis, data interpretation, paper arrangement and revision,
writing, and submission; US: Data collection, data analysis, data
interpretation, paper arrangement and revision, and writing;
CR: Data interpretation, research design, paper arrangement
and revision, and writing; TB: Data interpretation, paper
arrangement and revision, and writing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We wish to thank Elena Dawkins for insightful discussions and
feedback on earlier versions of the paper, Cheryl Charles for
facilitating the empirical investigation, and the two reviewers for
their invaluable inputs.
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