Combining Social Network Analysis to Explore Rural Textile Consumer Preferences and Communication Paths
Main Article Content
Abstract
In rural areas, textile purchase decisions are strongly influenced by neighborhood reputation, cultural identity, and regional aesthetics and exhibit significant social communication characteristics. Traditional market research methods struggle to capture the dynamic evolution of preferences in rural textile consumption scenarios, and existing social network models often lack the multidimensional integrated modeling capabilities. This paper proposed a multidimensional modeling method that integrates social network analysis, natural language processing and a graph neural network. On the basis of the user behavior logs of rural e-commerce platforms, a weighted social network (3,685 nodes, 19,243 edges) was constructed, and seven consumer groups with geographical affiliation characteristics were identified by combining the improved Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model and the Louvain algorithm. The GAT model was used to integrate historical purchase and sentiment features to achieve preference trend prediction at the community level, and the improved SIR model was introduced to simulate the negative word-of-mouth communication mechanism by integrating node influence and trust parameters. The experimental results show that the model constructed in this paper performs well in terms of preference classification, community division and communication path prediction. The preference emotion classification accuracy is 92.4%, and the modularity index is 0.43. This study provides a theoretical basis and practical support for the modeling of rural market consumption preferences and precise intervention strategies based on community structure.
Downloads
Article Details

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
References
K. Sutherland, S. Casey, and G. Crimmins, “Social media behaviors and barriers impacting women e-commerce entrepreneurs in rural Australia: A pilot study,” Community Development, vol. 56, no. 1, pp. 39-58, 2025.
Y. Song, L. Li, S. Sindakis, S. Aggarwal, C. Chen, and S. Showkat, “Examining e-commerce adoption in farmer entrepreneurship and the role of social networks: data from China,” Journal of the Knowledge Economy, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 8290-8326, 2024.
T. M. Wanigapura, T. Guruge, I. V. Kuruppu, and P. C. Abeysiriwardana, “Diversified impact of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) on consumer communities: a developing country perspective,” Decision, pp. 1-17, 2025.
I. Ghosal, B. Prasad, M. P. Behera, and A. Kumar, “Depicting the prototype change in rural consumer behaviour: An empirical survey on online purchase intention,” Paradigm, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 161-180, 2021.
I. Antosova, M. Psurny, and J. Stavkova, “Changes in consumer purchasing decisions: Traditional and emerging factors in the dynamic marketing landscape over 15 years,” Marketing i Menedžment Innovacij, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 85-96, 2023.
Y. Ren, B. Castro Campos, Y. Peng, and T. Glauben, “Nutrition transition with accelerating urbanization? Empirical evidence from rural China,” Nutrients, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 921-939, 2021.
J. Yang, J. Li, and Y. Cao, “Analysis of peer effects on consumption in rural China based on social networks,” Applied Economics, vol. 55, no. 6, pp. 617-635, 2023.
K. Osei-Frimpong, G. McLean, N. Islam, and B. A. Otoo, “What drives me there? The interplay of socio-psychological gratification and consumer values in social media brand engagement,” Journal of Business Research, vol. 146, pp. 288-307, 2022.
H. Zhang, E. Millan, K. Money, and P. Guo, “E-commerce development, poverty reduction and income growth in rural China,” Journal of Strategy and Management, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 148-176, 2025.
V. R. Revathy, A. S. Pillai, and F. Daneshfar, “LyEmoBERT: Classification of lyrics’ emotion and recommendation using a pre-trained model,” Procedia Computer Science, vol. 218, pp. 1196-1208, 2023.
H. Wang and J. Leskovec, “Combining graph convolutional neural networks and label propagation,” ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 1-27, 2021.
Z. A. Rahman, B. A. Talip, and H. Sarirah, “Exploring Customer Review of Local Agriculture Product Acceptance in Malaysia: A Concept Paper on Sentiment Mining,” International Journal on Perceptive and Cognitive Computing, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 29-39, 2024.
D. Modi and L. Zhao, “Social media analysis of consumer opinion on apparel supply chain transparency,” Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management: An International Journal, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 465-481, 2021.
L. Ren, B. Zhu, and Z. Xu, “Robust consumer preference analysis with a social network,” Information Sciences, vol. 566, pp. 379-400, 2021.
H. Fe, “Social networks and consumer behavior: Evidence from Yelp,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, vol. 209, pp. 1-14, 2023.
N. S. Sattar and S. Arifuzzaman, “Scalable distributed Louvain algorithm for community detection in large graphs,” The Journal of Supercomputing, vol. 78, no. 7, pp. 10275-10309, 2022.
C. Wang, F. Wang, and T. Onega, “Network optimization approach to delineating health care service areas: Spatially constrained Louvain and Leiden algorithms,” Transactions in GIS, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 1065-1081, 2021.
M. Rostami, M. Oussalah, K. Berahmand, and V. Farrahi, “Community detection algorithms in healthcare applications: A systematic review,” IEEE Access, vol. 11, pp. 30247-30272, 2023.
R. Mao, Q. Liu, K. He, W. Li, and E. Cambria, “The biases of pre-trained language models: An empirical study on prompt-based sentiment analysis and emotion detection,” IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 1743-1753, 2022.
Y. Kit and M. M. Mokji, “Sentiment analysis using pre-trained language model with no fine-tuning and less resource,” IEEE Access, vol. 10, pp. 107056-107065, 2022.
D. Deepa and A. Tamilarasi, “Bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) language model for sentiment analysis task,” Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education, vol. 12, no. 7, pp. 1708-1721, 2021.
R. Zhao and X. Han, “Prediction Method of Fruit and Vegetable Product Consumption Behavior Based on Graph Neural Network,” Pak. J. Agri. Sci, vol. 61, no. 4, pp. 1235-1245, 2024.
L. Jain, R. Katarya, and S. Sachdeva, “Opinion leaders for information diffusion using graph neural network in online social networks,” ACM Transactions on the Web, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 1-37, 2023.
X. Chen, H. Xie, S. J. Qin, Y. Chai, X. Tao, and F. L. Wang, “Cognitive-inspired deep learning models for aspect-based sentiment analysis: A retrospective overview and bibliometric analysis,” Cognitive Computation, vol. 16, no. 6, pp. 3518-3556, 2024.
A. Razaque, S. Rizvi, M. Almiani, and A. Al Rahayfeh, “State-of-art review of information diffusion models and their impact on social network vulnerabilities,” Journal of King Saud University-Computer and Information Sciences, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 1275-1294, 2022.
R. Palalic, V. Ramadani, S. Mariam Gilani, S. Gërguri-Rashiti, and L. P. Dana, “Social media and consumer buying behavior decision: What entrepreneurs should know?” Management Decision, vol. 59, no. 6, pp. 1249-1270, 2021.
A. S. Krishen, Y. K. Dwivedi, N. Bindu, and K. S. Kumar, “A broad overview of interactive digital marketing: A bibliometric network analysis,” Journal of Business Research, vol. 131, pp. 183-195, 2021.
J. Son and L. S. Niehm, “Using social media to navigate changing rural markets: The case of small community retail and service businesses,” Journal of Small Business & Entrepreneurship, vol. 33, no. 6, pp. 619-637, 2021.
W. Zhang, P. K. Chintagunta, and M. U. Kalwani, “Social media, influencers, and adoption of an eco-friendly product: Field experiment evidence from rural China,” Journal of Marketing, vol. 85, no. 3, pp. 10-27, 2021.
J. Yadav, A. Yadav, M. Misra, N. P. Rana, and J. Zhou, “Role of social media in technology adoption for sustainable agriculture practices: Evidence from twitter analytics,” Communications of the Association for Information Systems, vol. 52, no. 1, pp. 833-851, 2023.