Discussion and conclusions
The findings of this interpretive analysis expands current understanding of children’s perspectives
and understandings of emotional difficulties, and suggest that children as young as eight may hold
sophisticated and complex views, similar to those reported by studies with older children (for
example, Maas, Marecek, & Travers, 1978; Secker et al., 1999). The children in this study were
able to speculate on possible causes of the characters’ emotional difficulties and generated a diverse
range of explanations, mainly around external, socio-environmental causes, such as family, friends,
socio-economic and educational factors.