Audience responses to and interactional dynamics of transnational digital narratives by international students in China: a thematic and configurational analysis of YouTube comments
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Digital platforms are reshaping the configuration of communicative actors and the processes through which meaning is produced in transnational communication. Individuals with sustained cross-cultural living experience have also become important communicative actors connecting different social experiences with public understanding. Existing research has paid considerable attention to the digital expressions of transnational individuals and audience evaluations of such content. However, further investigation is needed into how transnational experiential narratives are understood by audiences after entering platforms, how the focus of responses changes in subsequent interaction, and how different response structures are associated with platform communication performance. Drawing on YouTube videos produced by international students in China and their comment data, this study employs BERTopic-based topic identification, analysis of thematic correspondence between comments and replies, and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to examine audience response structures, interactional changes, and their relationships with platform communication performance. The findings reveal that transnational experiential narratives generate a multilayered structure of audience responses within the comment space, ranging from relational interaction and the practical use of lived experience to risk appraisal and national and societal interpretation. Between comments and associated replies, there is both thematic retention and a substantial proportion of thematic transition. Concrete experiences of living and studying more often serve as starting points for subsequent discussion, while responses become more concentrated around relational-affective engagement and educational information seeking at the reply stage. Configurational analysis further shows that higher composite communication performance does not correspond to any single response theme but is associated with specific combinations of multiple audience responses. In particular, the lower salience of concrete study-abroad-life discussion and the higher salience of national and transnational interpretive frames are relatively stable features across different minimization solutions. The study shows that the communicative meaning of transnational experiential narratives is not fixed once creators complete their expression, but is continuously generated through audience understanding, response, and interaction. Their communication performance is therefore better understood through the combinational relationships among multiple audience responses than through single-theme effects.
Source: Frontiers in Psychology
Authors: Ning Wang, Jinling Wang
Language: English
Subfield: Communication
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,801
OpenAlex ID: W7222985674