The first step of this research project was to create a data sample of 15 of the top comments in each of the 30 mukbang videos I collected, including 15 videos from perceived thin YouTubers and 15 videos from perceived not thin YouTubers.
By doing both interpretive and basic content analyses, the sampled comments were scanned on these videos for different cues and codewords that allowed me to understand the feelings towards the creator in the video and what topics come up more frequently under different videos. I was then able to further specify this coding as I continued, where I created a list of positive, neutral, or negative feeling comments under each video to understand the general overarching reaction to the video.