Playing away from home: a qualitative sentiment analysis of online viewers’ non-social emotions on sex tourism vlogs

Abstract

ABSTRACT Popular yet so controversial, sex tourism remains a significant attraction in Southeast Asia, generating an abundance of scholarly explorations. However, little is known about the emotions expressed by viewers on user-generated content regarding this contentious form of tourism. Thus, this qualitative sentiment analysis, which aims to dilate non-social emotions found in comments expressed by online viewers on video content featuring sex tourism in Southeast Asia, is conducted. Through Data Miner, online comments (n = 10,864) were gathered and extracted from purposively selected sex tourism vlogs on YouTube, which were then subjected to Phronetic Iterative Qualitative Data Analysis (PIQDA) (Tracy, 2013). A member-checking procedure was performed further to establish the validity of the study’s findings. Interestingly, a model dubbed YouTube online viewers’ non-social emotions on sex tourism as a magnetic field consisting of labelled emotions known as enabling and disabling has emerged in this qualitative study. Notably, enabling emotions capture distinct emotions of interest, admiration, joy, amusement, satisfaction, sexual desire, excitement, awe, and romance. The second notion, disabling emotions, encapsulates patent emotions of dislike, anger, boredom, sadness, confusion, emphatic pain, disappointment, disgust, fear, anxiety, and awkwardness. Theoretical and practical implications, limitations, and recommendations on non-social emotions in tourism were discussed in this paper.