Research Experience
For this next set of wine mom research I used the tools we looked into in class, the Wikipedia article for “Wine Mom” and the library database. I used the general search in the UNH library database to search “Wine Mom”. I found a transcript of an ABC interview done by Deborah Roberts with a wine mom as she described her personal struggles with alcoholism.
I then looked at the Wikipedia article. It was very short and had little info but one of the sources was titled, “I Became A Pandemic ‘Wine Mom.’ Here’s What I Learned.” This was a perspective which I had not looked into yet, how Covid affected wine moms, so I read the article. It was an article written by Amanda Montei, a feminist author about her own struggles with wine during the pandemic. This was eye opening as another path to examine wine moms.
I then went back to the UNH databases and generally searched “wine moms Covid”. There were only 3 researched sources relevant to this topic so I clicked the top one, ““Yu haf no idr how feckin fablus I feel rite now”: “Wine mom” humour in an online support group for mothers during COVID-19”. This was a study done in an academic journal about how wine moms HELPED each other during Covid-19 despite the hardships associated with being a wine mom.
THE SOURCE
The most impactful source to my research this round was the study from the academic journal. I opened it at first from the database and immediately felt intimidated by the length. Professional studies in journals have so many detailed sections like their background information, the credibility and necessity of their research, and other relevant information before they even get to the specifics of what the specific study analyzed. I thought this would be a lot to go through, but as I read I was pleasantly surprised with how easily I understood. I even found other sources I have found in their cited works. This allowed me to feel validated in my research as I felt I was on the right track.
The keywords for this article were Covid-19 and wine moms so I thought the article would have to do with mental and/or physical health of wine moms during the pandemic. However, the study actually was focused on how wine moms built a community of support during the pandemic. The article gave plenty of examples of how wine moms are in some ways harmful, but in other ways helpful in the background information. The actual study happened to explain how wine mom groups were helpful to moms during the pandemic as it allowed them to share advice and humor in such a dark time. This humor and connection came through the moms’ linguistics and “meme” format in which they shared information on Facebook.
The Experience
This source allowed me to feel like I had an expanded view of the situation I was examining.
I had not considered the possibility that the wine mom community could be helpful in anyway; especially after reading another article about the damages the wine mom community did to a mother during covid. However, the results of this study showed that the moms uplifted each other in an unsure time with their humor. Analysis was a prominent feature of the study.
As the study explained, the humor of wine moms was created with the linguistics and multi-strategies to communicate on social media. While communicating online, moms could create humor by spelling things wrong to convey drunkenness like in the title of the article, “Yu Haf No Idr How Feckin Fablus I Feel Rite Now”. This example shows how linguistics were manipulated to convey humor online while isolated physically. Strategies employed to communicate humor were “advice-giving” in which a mom would share advice a doctor said, interpret it obviously wrong, and then making a drinking joke; another was how a mom would make a fake BREAKING NEWS post to resemble a news station’s post and state how moms should be sent to wineries to protect their families from Covid. The analysis of linguistics was more specifically what the authors did in the study.
These features and technologies were used by the women in the study but examined and explained by the authors which help me as a researcher better understand the wine mom community better. Analysis of linguistics led me to gain an expanded view of wine moms as this study explained the helpfulness and ease in the community which soothed others.
Bibliography – Mentioned or Referenced Works
Montei, Amanda. “I Became A Pandemic ‘Wine Mom.’ Here’s What I Learned.” HuffPost, 18 Aug. 2021, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wine-mom-covid-19-pandemic_n_611bd2f5e4b0ff60bf7a192b.
Roberts, Deborah. “Mommy Wine Culture.” 16 Sep. 2019, https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=2167f078-d91d-31eb-8421-d9892679ca70.
Tse, Vincent Wai Sum, and Olga Zayts-Spence. “‘Yu Haf No Idr How Feckin Fablus I Feel Rite Now’: ‘Wine Mom’ Humour in an Online Support Group for Mothers during COVID-19.” Discourse, Context & Media, vol. 61, Oct. 2024, p. 100816. ScienceDirect, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100816.
