A Grounded Theory Study of Audience Emotional Experience in Chinese Web-based Craftsmanship Documentaries

Amid globalization and modernization, maintaining national identity and folk culture has become a pressing issue. While web-based craftsmanship documentaries are rapidly emerging in the digital media environment, their role in shaping cultural identity remains underexplored. Using a procedural grounded theory approach, this study investigates nine viewers through semi-structured interviews, adopting theoretical sampling and constant comparison. Findings reveal five main emotional responses—empathy, enjoyment, pride, concern, and dissatisfaction—forming a progressive mechanism of emotion–cognition and reflection–cultural identity. These emotions not only reflect viewers’ complex perceptions of craftsmen and their skills but also resonate with personal memories and cultural experiences, fostering re-identification with tradition and reconstruction of cultural belonging. The study highlights documentaries as cultural learning devices that trigger emotions and activate memory to promote cultural identity reconstruction, enriching debates on media, culture, and identity. This framework extends cinematic emotion research by integrating cultural identity into the process of emotional generation and cognitive processing, offering a renewed perspective on digital documentary audiences.