Yixuan Liu

Objective: The study aimed to explore how different groups of people perceive good mother ideals in China and the cultural and sociodemographic profiles of these groups.Background: Good mother ideals have changed over time and become increasingly complex. The prevalence of intensive mothering has been supported mainly by media representation research and dominated by Western‐focused studies. How tensions between Confucianism and neoliberalism alter the good mother ideas in contemporary China requires further investigation.Method: First, we used an open‐ended survey to collect good mother attributes. Then, we conducted a latent profile analysis with an online survey (N = 449) to divide people into subgroups according to their latent perception structures. Later, we ran multinominal logistic regressions to explore whether cultural values and sociodemographic variables can predict group membership.Results: Collected attributes (N = 1,162) were organized into five categories: neutrality (37.87%), femininity (25.39%), motherhood (11.53%), family responsibilities (6.71%), and childcare responsibilities (18.5%). Moreover, we identified three groups holding different motherhood beliefs: Whatever, Average, and Perfectionist. Young people had higher odds to be in the Whatever group and held more flexible good mother ideals, and married women were 6.69 times more likely to be in the Perfectionist group than single men. Our findings also indicated that people in the Perfectionist group scored higher on attitudes toward family and Asian values.Conclusion: Our research suggested that researchers must distinguish between dominant motherhood representation and lay perceptions of motherhood as well as pay attention to the cultural sensitivity of good mother ideals.

This study analyzes the dominant discourses around postpartum recovery and mothers’ responses to them on Xiaohongshu, a popular social media platform in China. From a Foucauldian point of view, this study follows the approach of critical discourse analysis and conducts the analysis based on 300 posts about postpartum recovery. The results reveal that mothers relinquish the control of their own postpartum body to authoritative knowledge. The unattainable goal of girlishness for mothers propagates narrow visions of what a “normal” postpartum body should be by spreading the before-versus-after templates. Moreover, the dominant discourses are legitimated and penetrated by the mutually dependent and reinforcing moral regulations of the second shift (childcare) and third shift (bodywork). Therefore, mothers would internalize these discourses unconsciously, conduct better self-surveillance through quantified self-report data and invited surveillance in group settings, and pursue a docile postpartum body. This study also explores platform power in cultural production by delineating the new motherhood imaginary on the social media platform. This imaginary unpacks the competing realities of home, work, and self-care for mothers in contemporary China and extends the understanding of the new third shift bodywork as mothers’ neoliberal personal responsibilities and an emergent component of motherhood

Based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB), the current study developed a model to understand motivations and predictors of viewers’ virtual gifting behaviors in online live streaming. The model was tested with data from 392 live streaming viewers with previous virtual gifting experiences. The results showed that perceived pleasure, interaction with streamers, group interactions, and support for streamers can predict individual attitudes toward virtual gifting. Subjective norms learned from family and friends as well as streamers and viewers in live streaming could significantly affect virtual gifting intention. Quality of streams, the attractiveness of the streamers, and viewers’ monetary resources influenced perceived ease of virtual gifting. Overall, the proposed model predicted virtual gifting behavior well. Findings were discussed in terms of the links between online and offline subjective norms along with the relationship of perceived behavior control, virtual gifting intention, and virtual gifting behavior. We suggest that the adjusted TPB model with subjective norms both offline and online can fit the online interaction contexts well and explain online norms development. Furthermore, our model reflects how social incentive contributes to virtual gifting. These findings offer insights into the motivations of virtual gifting behavior and provide implications for virtual gifting experience design.