During the same period the number of children in day-care increased more than ten times. This reform was led by the official 1968 Child-Care Committee. In 1972 a new educational programme was introduced which was in direct opposition to the existing Kindergarten programme. The latter was based on theories put forward by developmental psychologists like Ch. Some of the effects were the banning of child observation and detailed planning, because these represented, it was claimed, ways of objectifying the children.
Disciplinary knowledge is public and available in a written form.
At the time of the investigation, there were practically no textbooks on pre-school methods in Sweden. The phenomenographical approach has developed from the observation that people, as a rule, seem to experience and conceptualise phenomena or aspects of the world around them in a limited number of qualitatively different ways. Identifying the categories of description, in terms of which people's differing understandings of a certain phenomenon can be characterized, is seen as the main result of the investigation. 40 lecturers agreed to participate. The reason for choosing a stratified sampling procedure was to maximize the variation in the answers.