An Analysis of Research Trends Related to Children's Play Therapy Using Keyword Network Analysis

Objectives The purpose of this study is to examine research trends related to infant play therapy using keyword network analysis. Methods For this purpose, a total of 486 academic theses related to the keywords of ‘young child’ and ‘play therapy’ were collected from RISS. The collected keywords were refined through excel, and the refined keywords were analyzed using the Netminer 4.0 program to analyze the keyword frequency, co-occurrence frequency, network attributes and centrality (connection, proximity, and mediation) of the top 30 keywords among all keywords, and visualized the analysis results. Results First, as for the frequency of keywords appearing in the research related to children's play therapy, ‘Art Therapy’ was the highest frequency, followed by ‘Group Art Therapy’ and ‘Emotional Intelligence’. As for the frequency of co-occurrence, ‘emotional intelligence-group art therapy’ showed the highest frequency, followed by ‘sociality-problem behavior’, ‘sociality-group art therapy’, and ‘emotional intelligence-art therapy’. Second, the analysis of the centrality of the research related to children's play therapy showed that ‘Art Therapy’, ‘Group Art Therapy’, and ‘Problem Behavior’ were equally high in connection centrality, proximity centrality, and mediation centrality.Next, the connection centrality was shown in the order of ‘emotional intelligence’ and ‘self-esteem’, the proximity centrality was shown in the order of ‘self-esteem’ and ‘emotional intelligence’, and the mediating centrality was shown in the order of ‘emotional intelligence’ and ‘music therapy’. Conclusions The results of this study are meaningful in providing implications for the theme and direction of infant play therapy research by grasping the trends of play therapy research for infants, and it is expected that the research on infant play therapy will become a guide for future research and revitalize related research.