One of the limitations of this research is researcher bias. While analyzing comments, there is no concrete way of understanding exactly what the commenter meant with their words. As a result, I had to interpret these comments and infer what emotions and meanings were hidden behind the content of each one. However, due to my familiarity with online spaces growing up in the digital world, I feel that I have a strong understanding of what each comment was attempting to convey.
Another limitation applies to my sampling methods. One of the criteria that a video had to follow to be used in this research was its view count being over fifty thousand views. This significantly limited the population of videos that I could sample. Due to societal standards and the subsconscious desire to only watch people who embody what we wish to be ourselves (De Brún et al., 2014), many larger-bodied YouTubers are unable to gain as much popularity as their thin counterparts. This led to a small population of not-thin mukbang YouTubers for me to choose from. However, there was still enough in the original population to create a strong sample of YouTubers on both the thin and not thin sides of this research, but there would not have been enough if I had done a larger sample size with this view count restriction.