More Than a Wife and a Mom: A Study of Mom Vlogging Practices in China

TL;DR

This study explores the motivations, practices, and challenges of mom vloggers in China, highlighting their financial, social, and personal identity pursuits through short videos, and offers design implications to support them.

Contribution

It provides new insights into mom vloggers' motivations, challenges, and practices in China, combining interviews and content analysis to inform supportive design solutions.

Findings

Mom vloggers aim to make money, record life, and seek identity.

They face challenges like low video visibility and privacy concerns.

Vloggers experience tension between motherhood and digital work.

Abstract

Mom vloggers are stay-at-home moms who record and share their daily life through short videos. In this exploratory study, we aspire to understand mom vloggers' motivations, practices, and challenges. Our mixed-methods inspection contained interviews with 4 mom vloggers in China and a content analysis of mom vlogs of 5 other mom vloggers. Mom vloggers' primary motivations are to make money, record daily life, and seek their individual identities and values, well meeting their financial and social needs after leaving their paid employment. When creating vlog content, mom bloggers encounter various challenges, such as a lack of video visibility, being stretched by both intensive motherhood and heavy digital work, privacy and self-presentation concerns, and so on. Based on the findings, we propose design implications toward resolving these challenges and benefiting mom vloggers' experiences.