Understanding the Nature Play Milieu

Using Behavior Mapping to Investigate Children's Activities in Outdoor Play Spaces

Abstract

When children engage with the natural world, they experience myriad benefits to their health and well-being. Play in outdoor and natural environments is critical for children’s healthy social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development. Developing high-quality, engaging natural play spaces may be one strategy to afford children greater access to the outdoors and nature-based play. Additional research on children’s play in nature is needed to inform the design of nature play spaces. Behavior mapping is a flexible observational research method that can effectively capture both children’s behavior as well as its social and environmental context, or “milieu.” The authors outline a customized behavior mapping protocol tailored to explore children’s play behaviors in outdoor play spaces and provide examples of its value from a recent study in a naturalized play space.