A Corpus Based Study of Digital Domesticity in Pakistani Family Vlogs

Abstract

The popularity of family vlogging in social media (e.g., YouTube, Instagram, TikTok) has grown to a global scale and is now also prevalent in South Asia. Family vlogs document all aspects of family life including their daily routines, parenting style, family celebrations, vacations, and holidays. This research explores Pakistani audience perceptions of YouTube family vlogs. This study analyzes 15,000 comments (186,888 tokens) from 30 videos posted on top three leading family vlogs channels. These channels include Rajab Butt Vlogs, Sistrology and Ducky Bhai Vlogs, on which videos were posted by these family vloggers between 2024 and 2025. It employs inductive thematic analysis by Braun and Clarke (2006) along with corpus linguistic tool like Sketch Engine to determine the presence of recurrent themes, common linguistic forms and patterns. The results indicate complex trends where audience actively negotiate authenticity, gender performance and commercialization of family narratives. It further reflects the tension between tradition and modernity, highlighting the role of comment sections as participatory spaces. This study provides new empirical and theoretical contributions to the areas of the digital media and South Asian cultural studies. It also focuses on audience agency and co-creation of meaning in digital family entertainment.