Gendered Narratives in Motion: A Comparative Study of Travel Blogging Trends Among Malaysian Male and Female Influencers in Digital Landscapes

Abstract

The present study involves the analysis of language in the written contents of travel bloggers in Malaysia. It pays attention to the different features that male and female bloggers use in their descriptive writing style and usage of keywords. As has been indicated earlier, qualitative research methods are more appropriate for textual data analysis. This, therefore, is what the study did. The data in this study relate to written contents of Malaysian travel bloggers. The study also applies content analysis, which is proven to be efficient in the systematic study of written text. A combined purposive sampling and random sampling approach was adopted to select the sample in this study. Purposive sampling criterion made sure that the bloggers selected were pertinent to the research objectives; however, random sampling was applied to eliminate bias and enhance generalizability. Such a duality allowed the study to reach a balanced and fairly representative sample of Malaysian travel bloggers, incorporating both male and female voices. The theoretical framework was based on Lakoff (1974) concerning language and gender; men and women have different ways of speaking because of social and cultural forces. The results found substantive differences between Malaysian male and female travel bloggers. Female bloggers have a preference for very descriptive language, using their narrative to describe their experiences in much detail and color female bloggers are found to use more intensifiers, more hedging, more tag questions, more empty adjectives than male travel bloggers, so, to speak at the emotional level, to soften statements, to seek validation, and to express opinions. For example, "so," "maybe," "isn't it," and "adorable".