Emotional and Cultural Fulfillment in Dance Learning: A Qualitative Study of Youth Users on Douyin

Abstract

Social media has profoundly changed the way information is disseminated and communicated in various fields in the contemporary digital environment, including dance teaching. However, there is still a knowledge gap blindness in the academic research on what emotional and cultural needs youth users gain from dance teaching content disseminated through social media. Therefore, this study draws on use and gratification and constructivism theory to conduct the analysis to fill that research gap. In this study, we interviewed 12 youth users of Douyin who are 18-25 years old and not majoring in dance through the semi-structured in-depth interview method. It was found that the youth users gained six major emotional and cultural needs through learning dance on Douyin, namely “shame and longing, urgency and freedom, loneliness and strength reconstruction, fear and release, low self-esteem and self-improvement, cultural identity and self-confidence reconstruction”. This study innovatively explores how Douyin meets the emotional needs of economically limited users by lowering the cost of learning, which enriches the application of the use and gratification theory, and demonstrates how social media can optimize the learning experience of users in terms of economy, time, and psychological comfort. At the same time, it expands the application of constructivist learning theory by emphasizing the importance of Douyin in supporting personalized learning, cultural identity, and motivation enhancement, which provides new theoretical support for understanding user needs and psychological constructs in digital educational environments.