A snapshot in time: themes, tags and international reach - An analysis of the Journal of International Research in Early Childhood Education

A thematic content analysis of the seven issues (35 papers and two editorials) of the International Research in Early Childhood Education (IRECE) journal published by Monash University in Melbourne, Victoria was conducted to explore the themes over its five years of publication. Publications were grouped into defined data chunks by year and Leximancer was used to discover concepts and themes. Five dominant themes emerged: children/s; childhood; learning; parent/s and teacher/s. Pathway analyses were then conducted to more fully understand and describe each theme. Data were used to visually represent the most frequently appearing terms to form a tag cloud, which in turn contributes to the development of a 'folksonomy' for the journal. Finally, mentions of geographic regions were also explored which positively reflected on international focus of the journal.