Recent social changes in South Korea indicate that fathers’ roles have shifted from being primarily “work-oriented” toward seeking “work-family balance,” accompanied by increasing paternal involvement in childcare. Through big data analysis, this study examines how such trends are reflected in news articles and social networking service (SNS) discourse. A total of 919 articles from 11 nationwide daily newspapers (2016-2023) were analyzed using NetMiner and Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling. Between 2016 and 2019, the dominant themes included parental education, international case studies, changing gender roles and equality, low fertility, the division of childcare and housework in dual-income families, and paternal participation in play. Additional themes, such as men’s parental leave, gendered divisions of labor, changing stereotypes, and fathers’ engagement in play, emerged after the COVID-19 outbreak. For the SNS dataset, 2,842 comments on 158 YouTube videos about “dad childcare” (Jan-Jul 2023) were analyzed using NetMiner’s SNS Data Collector. The results showed overwhelmingly positive responses, expressing love, happiness, and gratitude, highlighting paternal involvement as essential to family values. These findings suggest that perceptions of fathers’ childcare roles have improved significantly and a gender-equal culture of sharing childcare and household responsibilities is expanding, underscoring the requirement for supportive policies and institutional backing.
Lee et al. (Sun,) studied this question.