Neediness in the Comments

This page presents a comprehensive analysis of audience attitudes toward the portrayal of male neediness in The Big Bang Theory (TBBT), including the description of the data collection, processing, and analysis. Two digital tools, Voyant and VADER, are adopted to generate data for further analysis. The results are helpful for enhancing audiences' understanding of the theme and characters.

Collecting Data

The first step is collecting audience reviews from various websites. To make the collected data more representative, 400 top-ranking reviews from movie-related websites such as IMDb, Amazon, and Rotten Tomatoes are gathered. These top-ranking comments could represent the audiences' general perceptions and attitudes to some extent. Additionally, Quora's comments are also an important supplement resource of our database because Quora reviews are always more professional, in-depth, and topic-focused, thereby contributing to a deeper comprehension of audience perception and attitudes towards the show's neediness. 

Processing Data

After collecting audience reviews in a Spreadsheet, the data is imported to a text-analysis platform --- Voyant Tools, which can show word frequency or collocation, generate word clouds from documents, and perform other text mining functions with HTML, PDF, XML, and other files. In this project, Voyant is used to identify the most frequent words in audience reviews. A stopword list is uploaded to exclude some definite and indefinite articles, conjunctions, or numerals that do not carry much meaning in the texts. Then, five frequent keywords related to "neediness" are chosen from the high-frequency word list to filter the 400 audience comments. Finally, 88 comments regarding the theme of neediness are produced as a new database to analyze the overall sentiment of audiences in VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner).

Voyant

Two points can be gained from the data analysis of this chart. First, "characters" is the second most frequently mentioned term in the audience's comments. It suggests that the audience does interact with the characters,  which echoes Bednarek's research (2012). Second, an array of words that connote positivity are displayed, such as "funny" "love" "laugh" and "humor", indicative of the audience's general positivity towards TBBT.  Targeted keyword searches are used instead of observing the frequency chart in general because this research focuses on "neediness" rather than all topics in TBBT

"Woman", "sex", "relationship", "girlfriend", and "love" are selected from the high-ranking word list because of their relatability with the theme of neediness. These five words are related to the audiences' perspective towards male characters' pursuit and desire for women and sex. The audience's perception of neediness in the play can be gauged by their attitude toward these particular words. In addition, the frequency of these words is notable, with "love" appearing 108 times and "relationship" appearing 57 times. This high frequency strengthens the credibility of our data analysis and supports the validity of our findings. 

VADER

This box plot shows that the median is at 0.62, the interquartile range is between 0.13 and 0.8, the minimum point is around -0.7 and the maximum is 1. In violin plot, the median is around 0.65, and the interquartile ranges from 0.35-0.75. This data information indicates that the majority of audiences have a positive sentiment on male neediness and "sex" themes in TBBT. The higher probability of scores between 0 and 1 further supports this observation. 

First, the depiction of male neediness and "sex" themes may be relatable to the audiences' personal experiences. This relatability may evoke audiences' positive responses and a sense of connection to the characters and the stories. Second, TBBT is known for its comedic style. The show always portrays male neediness and "sex" themes in a humorous way, making the audiences feel more at ease with these topics and leading to positive sentiment. For example, one audience mentions "I only put too much sex to remind you to be ready for a FEW jokes here and there, nothing too much!!!" People always appreciate the way of using humor to discuss sex or sexual themes in shows because it helps normalize these topics and encourages open conversations about them. Besides, the show's male neediness and "sex" themes could be regarded as a break from the stereotypes of masculinity, which may resonate with audiences who value the diversity in character portrayal and the exploration of a broader range of male experiences. 

From the violin plot, we can see that the median of people's compound sentiment score is close to 0.5, which indicates that audiences' sentiment towards "girlfriend" is generally positive in their comments. Also, the violin plot is widest around the value of 0.5, which indicates that most comments have a positive emotional attitude towards the sentiment of "girlfriend". The violin contour around 0 is significantly narrower, suggesting that there are fewer comments with a neutral attitude than those with a definite attitude. The thick black part in the middle represents the interquartile range, with values ranging from -0.5 to 0.6. From the thin black line, the sentiment values range from nearly -1.0 to nearly +1.0, showing that people's sentiment towards "girlfriend" in their comments is relatively wide.

The results of the box plot are more intuitive and show the division of people's emotions. The box plot shows that the lower quartile is about -0.4, while the middle quartile is between 0.25 and 0.5, which is about 0.4. The upper quartile is between 05 and 0.75, which is about 0.6. The Boxplot gives a more intuitive picture of the maximum and minimum values. A minimum value of <-0.75 indicates that the degree of negativity is higher in negative comments. In contrast, the maximum value is greater than 0.75, which indicates that people are equally positive in the positive comments. This also explains why the violin plot shows that fewer people have a neutral sentiment.

Combining the analysis results of the charts and the actual comments from the audience gives a more intuitive view of the sentiment toward "girlfriend". Most of the positive comments about "girlfriend" focused on the enthusiasm of the characters in TBBT when they were looking for girlfriends. For example, one comment reads, "It's nice to see a story about a man who is constantly looking for a girlfriend. For example, one comment said, "Sheldon found a girlfriend too! I'm so happy for him!" This shows that most of the comments are supportive and positive about the fact that their favorite characters have found girlfriends.

But as the show continues, when the characters have regular girlfriends, people are likely to get bored and the reviews become negative. For example, one viewer wrote in a review of a later season, "This season, the show's producers and writers seem to have gotten used to their pattern, and there seems to be little change or direction throughout the season; Leonard and Penny don't get together, they don't break up, and the tension between them seems to have disappeared. "This means that some viewers seem to be more interested in seeing the characters and their girlfriends have a little bit of fun and interaction, or keep the tension going. This can be the key to the attraction of "girlfriends". As the relationship becomes more certain, some of the viewers' comments may show a gradual loss of interest, such as boredom and a sense of routine, resulting in a negative mood in the comments.