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Research on Risk and Care Evaluation in the Comment Corpus of E-Commerce Platforms

Authors

  • Qixiang Geng

    Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Macao Polytechnic University, Macao 999078, China
  • Hongwei Lin

    Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Macao Polytechnic University, Macao 999078, China
  • Xi Wang

    Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Macao Polytechnic University, Macao 999078, China

    Centre of Sino-Western Cultural Studies, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Macao Polytechnic University, Macao 999078, China
  • Shufang Zhao Email

    Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Macao Polytechnic University, Macao 999078, China

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.30564/fls.v7i12.11858
Received: 29 August 2025 | Revised: 19 September 2025 | Accepted: 26 September 2025 | Published Online: 24 December 2025

Abstract

In the digital consumer ecosystem, online reviews for infant products serve as a critical locus for risk communication and caregiving identity construction. This study draws on a corpus of 11,435 consumer reviews of baby cribs collected from major Chinese e-commerce platforms to examine how parents linguistically articulate risk perceptions, evaluate product performance, and communicate caregiving concerns. Adopting a mixed-methods approach that combines Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling with manual qualitative coding, the analysis identifies five recurring discourse themes: Odor Risk, Safety Anxiety, Parental Responsibility, Emotional Externalization, and Esthetics & Design. The findings indicate that Odor Risk and Safety Anxiety constitute the most salient sources of parental concern. In particular, sensory cues such as smell, along with installation and assembly experiences, function as key indicators through which parents assess product reliability and potential safety hazards. These cues are frequently embedded in experiential narratives that describe inspection, mitigation, and evaluation processes. Beyond risk assessment, the analysis reveals a consistent narrative pattern in which parents negotiate a transition from initial apprehension to subsequent reassurance through specific discursive moves, including concessive structures and temporal sequencing. Importantly, online reviews are used not only to report product attributes but also to perform responsible parenting roles by demonstrating attentiveness, caution, and care. By foregrounding the interaction between sensory experience, risk evaluation, and affective stance, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of digital parenting discourse in high-involvement consumption contexts and highlights the social and communicative functions of online reviews in infant product markets.

Keywords:

Online Reviews, Parenting Discourse, Corpus-Based Study, Risk Communication

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Issue

2025 Vol.7 No.12

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Article

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Copyright © 2025 Qixiang Geng, Hongwei Lin, Xi Wang, Shufang Zhao

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