1 page paper on explaining your research topic and research questions according to guidelines from Booth et al Ch 3 – 6
This week, I was challenged by the question: “Whose expertise in education should we trust, school administrators, teachers, families and communities, education research, or cognitive psychologists?” When answering this question, I found myself thinking about the phrase, “the power of authority.” This led me to several other trains of thought. “How is authority constructed?” “Who influences our life and in what ways?” “Why do some Chinese people resist authority?” and “Why are some social media platforms, such as Little Red Book (Xiaohongshu, a lifestyle-sharing social media platform) exceedingly popular among high school students?” In narrowing these questions, I kept reminding myself of the format set by Booth et al. in Chapter 3 on naming your topic: “I am studying _, because_,in order to__.” Among all these different topics regarding the nature and influence of authority, the one that I am particularly interested in is the influence of the Little Red Book, since almost every teenager, college student, and young parent I know uses Xiaohongshu as a lifestyle guideline. Which is to say, the Xiaohongshu app has become far too popular to ignore its impact on our daily life.

Xiaohongshu uses user-generated content and online community building to produce detailed, real-time shopping information. With 158 million monthly active users, Xiaohongshu has demonstrated a powerful influence on users’ consumption attitudes, sometimes even promoting irrational consumption. But while the platform has millions of users in all age groups, I am most curious about the platform’s specific influence on teenagers aged 16-18. This group is still developing their consumption attitudes because they typically lack the money to afford everything they want to buy. Teaching teenagers good money habits and responsible consumerism has become a difficult task in this era of prevalent overconsumption. Thus, I want to study Xiaohongshu’s impact on teenagers, because I want to find out in what strategies and content are being used to attract them and how they engage in the Xiaohongshu community in order to help parents instill their kids with responsible consumerism. My research question is: What do Shanghai World Foreign Language School students aged 16-18 do when they use Xiaohongshu for technology and fashion?