“Do you miss nature?”: connection to nature of 8–11 years aged children during the COVID–19 pandemic in the Discovery Coast – south of Bahia
Connection to nature. Childhoods. Children's environmental perception. Environmental psychology.
Nowadays, themes related to nature lead to many discussions in civil society, in scientific institutions and even in the political sphere. In this, the connection to nature has been studied seeking to understand and explain the relationship of the human being with the natural environment, mainly, and what benefits and impacts this relationship can bring to both. In this sense, the present work is a mixed method research, with a concomitant triangulation strategy, which aims to describe the connection to nature of 8–11 years aged children from the extreme south of Bahia, as well as analyze if and how the social isolation resulting from the COVID–19 pandemic has affected this connection, from the children point of view. To collect the data, an online questionnaire has been applied, which includes the Connection to Nature Index proposed by Cheng and Monroe (2012), complemented by telephone interviews. So far, 41 children have answered the questionnaire and 15 children have been interviewed by phone. The quantitative and qualitative databases are being compared to detect possible convergences or differences in children's connection to nature. The systematized data are being analyzed through descriptive statistics, and they are presented here in tables, graphs and word clouds, discussed qualitatively. Initially, the data show that children relate nature mainly to biotic elements, such as animals and plants; the word cloud showed greater intensity for these two elements. The research has been demonstrating that children miss the contact with nature, since most of them responded that they miss being in nature, on the beach, bathing in the river or even climbing trees.