Content analysis of stories for preschoolers about honesty

The purpose of this study is to examine how selected stories, which written in Turkish by local or foreign authors for preschoolers, deal with honesty. In this basic interpretive qualitative study, data were collected through document analysis and analyzed through qualitative content analysis. Analyzed documents are: (1) Twenty-one picture books, which written in Turkish by local or foreign authors for preschoolers published between 2004 and 2015, (2) Nine stories about honesty published online by four Turkish Provincial Directorates Of National Education and (3) One story about honesty published online by Centre For Values Education. In this qualitatively designed study, the data were also analyzed through quantitative content analysis. The software QSR NVivo 11 was used to conduct a computer-assisted quantitative data analysis. The findings of the qualitative content analysis show that there are more honest behavior examples than dishonest behavior examples in the analyzed texts, the numbers of the positive outcomes of the honest behaviors and negative consequences of the dishonest behaviors in stories are close to each other and there are more negative emotions caused by dishonest behaviors than positive emotions caused by honest behaviors in the analyzed text. The most frequent of the words those have at least five letters in study group is the word "lie". The results of this study demonstrate that the most of the analyzed texts use "dishonesty and its negative consequences" than "honesty and its positive outcomes" in order to promote honesty. Keywords: preschool, early childhood, honesty, veracity, story, picture books