Why young people create content about healthy lifestyles: factor analysis of thematic blogs

Abstract

The article attempts to explore how young people’s motivation to create and maintain blogs related to healthy lifestyle is reflected in the blog content and investigates the relationship between the blog popularity and types of content.

Using the motives (to bring the common good, to present the experience and personal growth, interactions with friends, opportunity to earn money) revealed through unstructured interviews, the authors develop a hypothesis stating that motivation can shape blog’s content, thus it can be discovered through the corresponding symbolic representation. The authors use Factor Analysis (principal component technique) to test this hypothesis.

The findings suggest that popularization of healthy lifestyles can be achieved through growing social responsibility of young bloggers, their striving towards socially approved patterns to be discussed and proposed to their audience, as well as commercialization of blogs due to the growing popularity of this topic and the followers’ attention. Only those bloggers who are predominantly oriented towards interaction with their audience (with the remainder motives being secondary) have more opportunities than others: they have the largest number of followers who actively react to their content.

Acknowledgments. The study is funded by Russian Foundation for Basic Research (project no. 19-010-00850 “Institutional Modeling of Russian Cyberspace Economy”).