Research Trends on Empathy for Early Childhood Teachers

The purpose of this study is to analyze research trends related to the empathy of early childhood teachers and to suggest the tasks and directions of future research on the empathy of early childhood teachers. To this end, a total of 245 papers in 122 master's and doctoral dissertations and 123 academic journals were analyzed for 10 years from 2014 to 2024. As a result of the analysis, first, starting with 1 paper in 2010, 24 studies were published in 2019, and 37 studies were published in 2023, indicating that interest in empathy research is continuing. Second, in the analysis according to the variables, empathy was the most common independent variable with 192 studies, followed by 15 studies with dependent variables, 34 studies with mediating variables, and 4 studies with control variables. Third, the analysis by study subjects consisted of 103 papers for nursery school teachers, 85 papers for early childhood teachers, 47 papers for pre-service teachers, and 10 papers for kindergarten teachers. Fourth, the trend by research method showed that quantitative studies were the largest with 241 papers, followed by mixed studies with 3 papers and qualitative studies with 1 paper. Through this study, it is expected that the meaning of research related to the empathy of early childhood teachers can be rediscovered and used as basic data for preparing ways to increase teachers' empathy.