Open peer review. Vol 20 (Special Issue) China and the Digital Turn
Adapting to motherhood: Online participation in WeChat groups to support first-time mothers
Runxi Zeng; Hua Zhou; Richard Evans
Section: KARPETA
Reviewer A:
Please, comment on the most relevant aspects (positive points and areas to improve) of the reviewed article.
1. The idea of conceptualization green-hand mother seems interesting to general audience. Although the authors claimed that they have adopted the Internet ethnography, many more details regarding how this method is applied needs further justification. For example, the demographic of the green-hand mothers being survey, are they employed, their education background, child-raising pattern (the role of other family members in the child raising). 2. Meanwhile, how the data is analyzed? Did you coded the data, or use software? 3. The discussion is kind of insufficient, please refer to previous research in becoming mothers in social media era. In deeded, there are lots of research out there, please try to compare with your findings with them. 4. WeChat is closed social media platform. How is different from other social media platforms, please try to make some comparisons. 5. Please indicate your limitation and directions for future study.
Would you suggest any changes or make any recommendations to improve the quality of the article?
1. Please try to add some Tables or Figures to make your article more readable. 2. Try to think about your key message in the paper, and bring it to the audience. Is there any cultural factors needed to be reveal?
Reviewer B:
Please, comment on the most relevant aspects (positive points and areas to improve) of the reviewed article.
Generally speaking, the paper is worth of publishing. It is pertinent to the section topic. And it contribute to the further understanding of how new media platform like wechat group play a kind of role in the identity construction of green-hand mothers in china using digital ethnography methodology. In introduction part; the paper says “For most green-hand mothers in China today, due to the restrictions of the Chinese government's family planning policy, they did not experience raising a child before becoming a mother…” In fact, there is no relation between the green-hand mothers with no experience raising a child with the family planning policy, so the sentence could be deleted. There is no literature part. The paper needs to specifically review the literature in the area of new media and motherhood, and trying to link them together. The contributions to the literature should be further analyzed in the conclusion part. Rather only summarize the findings from the data analysis. Response: Thanks for your kind suggestion. We have added a new paragraph to the penultimate paragraph, which discusses two main issues: first, the online community as a WeChat group may be quite different from other online communities. Second, the parenting environment faced by Chinese society has a great impact on mothers' participation in online communities.
Would you suggest any changes or make any recommendations to improve the quality of the article?
Generally speaking, the paper is worth of publishing. It is pertinent to the section topic. And it contribute to the further understanding of how new media platform like wechat group play a kind of role in the identity construction of green-hand mothers in China using digital ethnography methodology. In introduction part; the paper says “For most green-hand mothers in China today, due to the restrictions of the Chinese government's family planning policy, they did not experience raising a child before becoming a mother…” In fact, there is no relation between the green-hand mothers with no experience raising a child with the family planning policy, so the sentence could be deleted. There is no literature part. The paper needs to specifically review the literature in the area of new media and motherhood, and trying to link them together. In the third paragraph of the introduction, we have added more than ten references of the recent five years, which are used as the literature review to reflect the latest relevant research. The contributions to the literature should be further analyzed in the conclusion part. Rather only summarize the findings from the data analysis.
I suggest that
1. the author add more references so that there can be more theoretical dialogue.
2. The English writing should be examined further, and I suggest that the author polish the English expression.
3. The authors noted that 12 interviewees were selected. It is suggested that the author can present the specific conditions of 12 interviewees in a tabular manner.
4. The reference format appears to be irregular, and corrections are recommended as required by the journal.
The text included important modifications before publication
