Mother of the Nation? Jacinda Ardern, social media and the politics of motherhood
Description
Data set from Instagram and Facebook from former Prime Minister of Aotearoa New Zealand Rt Hon. Jacinda Ardern (public figure). To understand how Ardern portrayed motherhood and political leadership on social media, we critically examined posts on two of her most active platforms, Facebook and Instagram. We performed reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2019) using multimodal data collected between Ardern’s pregnancy announcement on 27 January 2018 through to her resignation on 19 January 2023. We used the University of Lancaster’s Web Data research assistant to compile the posts and record the number of likes, shares, and comments. Our original data set consisted of N=1806 posts, which we reduced to posts in which Ardern visually or discursively referenced her own mothering, parenthood, care, or her daughter, Neve. Our final data collection consisted of N=56 individual posts and a sample of N=654 corresponding comments. We analysed the complete post—image and caption—as well as a sample of the top 20 responses to each image.
Files
Steps to reproduce
We used the University of Lancaster’s Web Data research assistant to compile the posts and record the number of likes, shares, and comments. Our original data set consisted of N=1806 posts, which we reduced to posts in which Ardern visually or discursively referenced her own mothering, parenthood, care, or her daughter, Neve. Our final data collection consisted of N=56 individual posts and a sample of N=654 corresponding comments. We analysed the complete post—image and caption—as well as a sample of the top 20 responses to each image.