Social and vocational identity in workers’ online posts: a large-scale Instagram content analysis of job-related hashtags

ABSTRACTInstagram may be a novel context in which vocational identity construction occurs by posting content about one’s profession. Yet, the content of such posts is unclear. Therefore, we performed a content analysis of 1,260 Instagram public feed posts that included a hashtag referring to gender-stereotypical professions (i.e. stereotypically male/female, gender-neutral) at multiple status levels (low, medium, high). We examined the posters’ sex and ethnicity in relation to the profession in which they portrayed themselves and whether individual differences (i.e. sex, ethnicity, gender typicality/status of the job) were reflected in references to work values (i.e. qualities a job can offer). No differences were observed in the types of jobs in which individuals portrayed themselves according to sex and ethnicity. Differences in work value portrayals were exhibited for users’ sex, ethnicity, gender typicality, and status of the job. Differences according to sex, gender typicality, and status of the job emerged with respect to the extent to which individuals’ posts referred to work values being (dis)satisfied. Our findings highlighted that work value posts of certain social groups (i.e. sex, ethnicity) reflect work value differences in the real-world.KEYWORDS: Content analysismedia psychologysocial mediavocational identity AcknowledgementThe authors would like to thank Miss Mart Moesen and Miss Maxine Vanhees for their help in coding the data.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Data availability statementAll the materials, data and syntaxes can be found in the Open Science framework at https://osf.io/6hd2b/. Note that the analyses and research questions were also preregistered before conducting the analyses: https://osf.io/p7khx?view_only=5ebb33ff74924c7882ccb6b25a6b7e68.Notes1 In this study, gender refers to any feelings, thoughts, behaviours, and attitudes that are associated with individuals’ sex assigned at birth by a specific culture (American Psychological Association Citation2020).2 We refer to sex when we mention individuals’ sex assigned at birth (American Psychological Association Citation2020).3 Note that we won’t further interpret the results of visual references to helping others as the OR’s and CI’s were very high due to the low amount of data.4 Note that the odds ratio for satisfying references to being able to help others was very high (OR = 798.12, 95% CI [15.51, 41078.83]) due to the low amount of data in the various categories. Therefore, we did not interpret this result any further.5 Note that the odds ratio for textual references to not receiving intellectual stimulation were very high due to insufficient data in the various categories, OR = 281.83, 95%CI[10.25; 7736.75]. Therefore, we did not interpret this result any further.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen) under Grant 11G0220N.