The Impact of Social Media use on Female Happiness: A Case Study in Chinese Women’ Selfies on Little Red Book

Proceedings of The 2nd International Conference on Gender Studies and Sexuality

Year: 2022

DOI:

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The Impact of Social Media use on Female Happiness: A Case Study in Chinese Women’ Selfies on Little Red Book

Huan Xie

 

ABSTRACT: 

One of the most discussed female social media behaviours, women’s selfies are considered to be associated with negative emotions such as loneliness (Yang, 2016), decreased self-esteem, and low self-esteem (Shin, 2017). In contradiction, selfies are also the social media behaviour associated with happiness, with those who take selfies always attempting to look happy in the photo and thus gain ‘likes’ from others (Pounders, 2016). However, the correlation between social media interactions and the slope of women’s happiness has not received much attention (Cara et al.,2018). Secondly, what social media user interaction behaviours in women’s selfies activities have not been discussed in-depth.

Therefore, this study aims to explore the social media interaction behaviours corresponding to selfies and investigate the relationship between women’s social media interaction behavior and happiness through a focus group study of users in one of the most popular women’s online social media, Little Red Book.

Focus group interviews will be used for this study. Around 50 participants are drawn randomly from the researcher’s following based on Little Red Book of four users who have posted more than three selfies in the last month (and subsequently removed from the final study sample), and the sample is expanded by a snowball sampling strategy (Caldeira, 2020). The findings will help us to understand the selfie-related social media interaction behaviours (e.g., shooting, commenting, liking, editing, etc.) on Little Red Book, and further investigate the positive relationship between social media interaction behaviours and women’s happiness.

keywords: Happiness; Interaction; Selfie; Social media; Women.