Influencing Factors Of Urban Young Parents’ Parenting Anxiety From The Perspective Of Media Affordance

At present,parenting anxiety has become a common social problem.Parenting anxiety is constantly intensifying in the process of media group interaction and information dissemination.The theory of media availability fully considers the initiative and agency of the agent,helps us to avoid falling into a simple stimulus-response mechanism as much as possible,and then studies the relationship between social media and the media use behavior of urban young parents and parenting anxiety.From the perspective of media affodance,this paper takes the We Chat platform as the research object to explore how the combination of media affordance in We Chat affects the generation and development of parenting anxiety among urban young parents.Since the impact of media affordance on parenting anxiety is a very complex issue,different media affordance plays different roles in the process of parenting information acquisition and sharing,and has different degrees and different effects on parenting anxiety.Therefore,in order to better grasp the media affordance in the use of We Chat and its impact on urban young parents,this study conducted semi-structured interviews with 25 urban young parents,and used a clear set of qualitative comparative analysis(cs QCA)to discuss the research issues.Through the retrospection of the theoretical research of existing scholars,this study takes the five dimensions of editability,communication,visibility,anonymity and persistence as the conditional variables,and parenting anxiety as the result variable.Following set theory and Boolean logic,this study performs causal variable encoding and cs QCA operations.The study found that persistence is a key condition for stimulating parenting anxiety among urban youth parents.The form of We Chat messages remains unchanged and repeated viewing is a concrete manifestation of We Chat’s persistence.We Chat’s strong record-keeping and archival nature makes urban young parents repeatedly flip through existing chat messages or public account pushes.A large amount of parenting information from different time periods is hoarded on the We Chat platform,providing information and conditions for urban young parents to make social comparisons,so that the interaction between We Chat persistence and visibility jointly promotes the generation and development of parenting anxiety.In addition,the study obtained three main influencing pathways for the generation of parenting anxiety among urban young parents:information load type,social stress type,and identity conflict type.In general,the parenting information exchange of urban young parents on the We Chat platform has a clear purpose,while their media use habits,abilities and content are different.On the basis of clarifying the connotation of the indicators of media affordance,this study pioneered the use of clear set qualitative comparative research(cs QCA)method to explore and study the mechanism and influence path of media affordance.It is also hoped that this research can play a role in leading the way,and have some inspiration for the application of media affordance theory and QCA methods in communication studies.