Courage in childhood: Classifying the actions of courage performed by elementary school students

The study is aimed at exploring, through lexical analysis, the courageous actions performed by elementary school students. Five hundred ninety-two Italian children were interviewed about the most courageous action that they had ever performed during their life. Exploratory cluster analysis with Iramuteq was run to analyse the children’s answers and four clusters were found. The first cluster referred to actions performed with physical risks (physical courage). The second cluster referred to actions to protect or defend others, especially peers, in difficult and unpleasant social situations (moral courage). The third cluster referred to courageous actions in dealing with threats concerning personal well-being (psychological courage) and the fourth cluster referred to physically and psychologically courageous actions. Gender differences were found for the first and third cluster with girls reporting more physical courage and boys more psychological courage. The study has important implications for research and practice.