K-Pop Fandom and Parasocial Relationships Across Cultural Contexts: A Text-Mining Review of Emotional Attachment and Social Identity from a Cultural Psychology Perspective

Research on K-pop fandom has grown rapidly, yet its literature on parasocial relationships, emotional attachment and social identity is dispersed across psychology, communication, marketing and tourism studies, which makes it hard to see what has been studied and how it is framed. This review applies text mining to a purposive corpus of 245 scholarly records on K-pop fandom and parasocial relationships, drawn from the reference list of this manuscript and not from a systematic database search. The scope is research on K-pop fans in any country; the review asks how the literature is framed, how often South Korea is named as a setting, and which topics key studies address on platforms, fan communities and local cultural contexts. Record titles and venues were analysed with term and n-gram frequencies, a ten-theme dictionary compared across three publication periods, non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) topic modelling and a term co-occurrence network. These results describe how records are titled and grouped; they are not findings about fans. In this corpus, 70% of dated records appeared in 2024–2026 and journal articles make up 66%. Consumption and marketing (n = 75) and parasocial interaction (n = 59) are the most prevalent themes. Six topics and four network communities emerged (modularity = 0.34); terms for attachment and purchase intention co-occur in titles, but the relationship between these constructs can only be assessed from the studies themselves. South Korea is named in only a few titles or venues, whereas Indonesia is named most often, although study settings were not verified from abstracts or full texts. A narrative overview of key studies identifies research on platform-mediated intimacy, on fan communities as sites of both belonging and strain, and on local cultural contexts; individual study findings and settings were not verified against abstracts or full texts. We outline a research agenda for comparative, culturally grounded studies, including verified studies of Korean domestic fans.