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.