By the numbers: a quantitative content analysis of children's picturebooks

Children's picturebooks are a distinctive art form and draw on a variety of story-telling and pictorial traditions; they are vibrant, everyday elements in the lives of many children. The dominant approach for researching picturebook content-stemming largely from the traditions in education and literary studies that have been most concerned with it-has been a qualitative one that focuses on detailed explorations of targeted books and a small number of children. This qualitative work has yielded (and continues to find) important insights. The current work, however, adopts a different approach and aims to a provide quantitative analysis of picturebooks. © 2013 Wagner.