Analysis of research trends in work family balance policy using text mining

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to confirm the achievements of existing studies by analyzing the research trends of the past 20 years of Work Family Balance Policy(WFBP), and to suggest future research directions. For this purpose, 157 papers in 22 journals with an impact factor of 1.0 or higher for the last 5 years as of 2020 were analyzed using text mining techniques in the journals registered in the field of social welfare of the National Research Foundation of Korea. According to Results First, an average of 8 papers have been published every year since 2001, mainly ‘family’, ‘women’, ‘policy’, ‘family-friendly’, ‘family-friendly policy’, ‘childcare’, ‘leave of absence’, ‘work family balance’, ‘work family conflict’, and ‘low fertility’. Second, as a result of semantic network analysis, ‘work family balance’ was highly related to ‘gender role’, ‘family policy’, ‘low fertility’, ‘support policy’, ‘family-friendly policy’, and ‘parental leave’. In addition, ‘father’ was found to be highly related to ‘family-friendly’, ‘work family conflict’, ‘family-friendly policy’, and ‘low fertility’ was highly related to ‘childcare policy’ and ‘education for children’. Finally, as a result of the topic modeling analysis, three topics could be identified, and topic 1 was ‘WFBP and gender’, topic 2 was ‘family-friendly policy’, and topic 3 was ‘childcare policy and welfare state ideology’. Based on the results of this analysis, the research trends of WFBP are summarized as follows. First, there is an effort to have a balanced perspective on gender effects in the study of WFBP. Second, WFBP research is deeply related to the low fertility situation, and it is intended to lay the foundation for fertility-related policies and childcare and childcare policies.