Early Childhood Learning Videos on YouTube: A Thematic Analysis of Viewer’s Perceptions

Abstract

The study was aimed to investigate the opinions of viewers who have watchedearly childhood education videos on YouTube regarding their acceptance andsuitability of videos for the purpose of Early Childhood Learning (ECL).Furthermore, study focused to explore whether these videos can be useful andeffective for the preschool children to educate them basics of knowledge. Aqualitative phenomenological approach was used to investigate theperceptions of viewers about their experience of the early childhood learningvideos through comments. Ten (10) videos with over 01 million views anduploaded on YouTube within a period of last 02 years were considered assample of study through purposive homogenous sampling technique.Furthermore, only comments in sensible English language were selected assample comments for analysis and interpretation purpose. From the selectedvideos, comments were scraped with the help of open source data miningsoftware (ytcomments). Qualitative thematic sentiment analysis techniquewas applied to identify significant meanings and themes from the commentsof the viewers. The sentiment analysis was supported by the use of NVivo 12software. Analytical findings emphasized that viewers have a positiveperception towards the usefulness and effectiveness of Early ChildhoodLearning YouTube videos.