Data production:

Participants

This study is based on 131 questionnaires distributed to all preschool teachers in the participating
preschools in both rural areas and urban cities. Both the urban regions and the rural area are stratified
to represent districts that differ geographically, demographically, ethnically, and have different
socioeconomic structures. These preschool teachers represent a range of preschool contexts, possessing
valuable variation of experiences. A total of 115 preschool teachers the completed the survey, resulting
in a response rate of 87.7%. The majority of the participants were female (98.3%), born during 1955–
1969, with Swedish as their mother tongue. Approximately 20% of the participant were born before
1955 and 30% were born after 1969. The majority of the participants were preschool teachers with a
university degree, and 20% were both educated child minders and preschool teachers. Almost half
(44.3%) of the participants had previous experience from another field of work not related to early
education. Close to 15% had no prior work experience at all and only a few (under 10%) reported that
they had previously worked in a preschool class, school or leisure time center. A majority of the
participants reported a range of 15– 24 children enrolled in the preschools. In addition to the
questionnaires, interviews with 30 female preschool teachers were conducted. The preschool teachers’
working experiences varied from a few years to 40 years: the youngest preschool teacher had just
started her career whereas the oldest were close to retirement. The teachers were initially selected by
the director or manager at the preschool and the selection was based partly on the preschool teachers’
interest in participating and partly on estimated competence. The latter refers to competences
recognized and valued by the director or manager at the particular preschool, since he or she was asked
to select preschool teachers that they considered highly competent. The preschool teachers were then
contacted by telephone. In addition an information letter was sent including information regarding
cooperation, the purpose of the study, time and location for interviews. The interviews were carried out
at each workplace and lasted between 60 and 120 minutes. All interviews began with a description of
the study and of ethical rules in social science research, i.e. requirements for confidentiality, consent,
information and autonomy, and highlighting that participation in the study was voluntary (Swedish
Research Council, 2002).

Questionnaire
Preschool teachers completed a questionnaire assessing different competencies, sought out to
represent teacher competence. A total of 10 statements concerned play competence. These were:
‘Ability of playfulness’, ‘ During my education I have developed play competence’, ‘As a preschool
teacher I have competence of children’s play’, ‘In my work I use the knowledge I have about children’s
play’, ‘In my work I use the knowledge that I have about how children learn to play’, ‘I have competence
to challenge children in their play’, ‘I have competence to answer children in their play’, ‘Children’s play
should dominate the preschool pedagogics’, ‘Children in the preschool should play with their friends’.
These items were rated on a LIKERT-scale ranging from 1(completely agree) to 4 (disagree), showing a
good internal consistency (a¼ 0.75). A play competence index was aggregated of these items. The
question about the ability of playfulness, were rated on a 5-point scale, where 1 ¼ represented
playfulness to be completely inherent, 2 ¼ mostly inherent, 3 ¼ both an inherent and a learned capacity,
4 ¼ mostly a learned capacity, and 5 ¼ completely a learned capacity (Mean ¼ 2.74, SD ¼ 1.205). The
descriptive statistics for the items included in the play competence index are displayed in Table 1.
Background questions such as age, number of years in the field and type of teacher education program
were also added to the questionnaire.