Content Analysis of a Decade's Work: 511 Authors, 177 Contributions - 10 Years of Fruhe Bildung

This paper analyzes the development of the journal Fruhe Bildung [Early Education] in the first decade of its publication. Using content analysis, we trace the authorship of the contributions, the methods applied in the articles, and their thematic focus. With this corpus, comprising 177 articles from 2011 to 2020, we find that the initially dominant psychological orientation on the part of the authors was replaced by a stronger presence of pedagogical experts, accompanied by an increase in qualitative research designs. Nevertheless, quantitative methods remained more prevalent than qualitative ones over the years. Thematically, children's competencies as well as the practices of daycare centers remained in the foreground. Significantly fewer papers dealt with staff training or children's perspectives.