Representing Parenting on Instagram: A Netnographic Study of the Instagram Pages of Iranian Influencer Mothers

Proceedings of The 4th World Conference on Social Sciences

Year: 2022

DOI:

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Representing Parenting on Instagram: A Netnographic Study of the Instagram Pages of Iranian Influencer Mothers

Fatemeh Safdari

ABSTRACT: 

Parenting is a multidimensional phenomenon that has undergone many changes with the advent of social networks. Sharing parenting on social media (sharenting) has changed the mental image of parenting and has multiple cultural-economic side effects. This study has focused on sharing and representing parenting in Iran. Constructive representations of parenting in Instagram is done by middle-class prosperous women. They often have few children and make a living by producing content about their lives on Instagram and advertising in their pages. By employing netnography method, 20 Instagram accounts with 700 thousand to two million followers have been observed and analyzed.  Semi-structured interviews with page owners as well as qualitative analysis of posts and stories have been conducted. The findings of the study are presented in two levels. Lower-order concepts that emerged from the netnographic data include: Happiness, family, peace, remember, love, pain. These themes are then collapsed into two broader themes: cognitions of housekeeping influncer mothers, and the emotions felt by them. The most mentioned two emotions are joy and gratitude.

keywords: Netnograghy, Representation, Sharenting, Social media.