Comparative Analysis of Social Media Discourse Structures on Appearance Management for Women with Disabilities: Focusing on Text Mining of Naver, Instagram, and YouTube

This study examined platform-specific structures of social media discourse related to appearance management among women with disabilities across Naver, Instagram, and YouTube. Appearance management among women with disabilities extends beyond beautification to encompass multidimensional issues related to welfare, accessibility, and self-expression. Data were collected over a three-year period (January 2023–December 2025) using combinations of search terms related to women, disability, appearance management, and beauty. The data were analyzed using text mining, keyword analysis, word cloud visualization, semantic network analysis, and CONCOR clustering. After data refinement, 7,411 Naver documents, 1,240 Instagram posts, and text metadata from 302 YouTube videos were collected, and the integrated text metadata of 159 videos were included in the final analysis. Naver showed the highest network density (0.4474), with discourse primarily structured around policy, welfare, support, and education; Instagram (density = 0.3211) showed discourse centered on disability, barrier-free accessibility, welfare centers, beauty practices, and volunteering; and YouTube (density = 0.3000) showed discourse emphasizing disability types, education, welfare, healthcare, and beauty-related support. CONCOR analysis identified four discourse clusters on each platform, although their compositions differed substantially across platforms, with institution- and welfare-oriented clusters on Naver, practice- and accessibility-oriented clusters on Instagram, and a relatively broad education-and-beauty-support cluster on YouTube. Across the three platforms, disability- and beauty-related keywords occupied central positions in the semantic networks, whereas the surrounding keyword structures differed across platforms. The findings suggest that platform-specific content structures and communication affordances may be associated with differences in the organization of online discourse related to disability and beauty, providing empirical insights for the development of platform-specific beauty support programs and digital welfare strategies.