Reflections Of Squid Game on Children's Games and Viewers; An Example of Twitter Sentiment Analysis and Qualitative Research

Abstract

This research was constituted by taking advantage of the opinions of audiences and Twitter users about the Squid Game series, which has great repercussions in the world. Besides the fact that the content of the series consists of many remarkable details, it is also aimed to examine the effect of converting traditional children's games into a bloody image on the audience. In the interviews, the messages received by the audience from the series, the interpretation of the traditional children's games in the series, empathetic thinking, and the relationship of the audience with their families were discussed as reasons for watching Squid Game. The data obtained were transferred to the MAXQDA program and edited. The data used in the study were revealed in two stages. In the first step, sentiment analysis (attitudes, feelings, and evaluations) of 451,540 tweets between 10.17.2021 and 01.25.2022 collected from Twitter were conducted through MAXQDA software. Secondly, qualitative interviews were conducted with 13 participants who watched the Squid Game series, and the resulting transcriptions were edited and analyzed together with a field expert. Subsequently, all the emerging findings were interpreted aggregately. As a result, the tweets of Twitter users about Squid Game and most of the data collected during the interviews with 13 participants had similarities in parallel. The popularity of traditional children's games has increased thanks to this series, but with children and teenagers under the age of 18 watching uncontrollably violent scenes, the games of our childhood were combined with violence and transferred to real life. With the increasing prevalence of this situation, the display of the series has been banned in some countries. In addition, among the reasons for watching the series, the influence of social media and the multiplicity of tweets with positive sentiment content (131,359) because of the sentiment status analysis of Twitter users are noteworthy.