The requirements for displaced nursery-teachers to be reinstated to nursery school

From analysis of interviews using text-mining

Abstract

As the lack of nursery teachers is a chronic issue at nursery schools, the latent potential reinstatement of once displaced teachers is widely expected. For those who have once left to return, it is necessary to plement support that takes into account the circumstances of each individual. In this study, we conducted uestionnaires and interviews with 16 nursery teachers who have left but returned to work as nursery teachers about their reasons for leaving and motivations of returning. The verbatim transcript of the interview was analyzed using text mining, from which characteristic keywords were picked up. WordCloud was then generated using the keywords and term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) method, where the individuality of each respondent emerged. In addition, by illustrating the keywords in a radar chart, the similarities and differences among the respondents were observed. It is shown that a two-dimensional plot may help to more explicitly visualize the correlations between respondents. However, the need for further elucidation of contextual analysis methods became apparent. Our study result indicates that by combining the knowledge of researchers with text mining method, the latent factors behind the reinstatement of the respondents could be uncovered.