This title is printed to order. This book may have been self-published. If so, we cannot guarantee the quality of the content. In the main most books will have gone through the editing process however some may not. We therefore suggest that you be aware of this before ordering this book. If in doubt check either the author or publisher’s details as we are unable to accept any returns unless they are faulty. Please contact us if you have any questions.
Rough-and-tumble play provided one of the paradigmatic examples of the appli- tion of ethological methods, back in the 1970’s. Since then, a modest number of - searchers have developed our knowledge of this kind of activity, using a variety of methods, and addressing some quite fundamental questions about age changes, sex diff- ences, nature and function of behaviour. In this chapter I will review work on this topic, mentioning particularly the interest in comparing results from different informants and different methods of investigation. Briefly, rough-and-tumble play (or R&T for short) refers to a cluster of behaviours whose core is rough but playful wrestling and tumbling on the ground; and whose general characteristic is that the behaviours seem to be agonistic but in a non-serious, playful c- text. The varieties of R&T, and the detailed differences between rough-and-tumble play and real fighting, will be discussed later. 2. A BRIEF HISTORY OF RESEARCH ON R&T In his pioneering work on human play, Groos (1901) described many kinds of rough-and-tumble play. However, R&T was virtually an ignored topic from then until the late 1960’s. There was, of course, a flowering of observational research on children in the 1920s and 1930s, especially in North America; but this research had a strong practical o- entation, and lacked the cross-species perspective and evolutionary orientation present in Groos’ work.
