Research Symposium

BIO

Hi, my name is Jordyn Phillips and I am from Houston, Texas. I am a finance major at FSU with aspirations to study business law post-grad and work in international corporate law. I have always had a interest in true crime, specifically in the media, and have advocated for gender equity throughout my high school and college experience, so I was naturally drawn to Ashley Johns and her research. I plan to advance in the research post-UROP and look forward to finding more patterns whilst coding; though our research is in infancy, there is so much value to understanding how gender inequities still exist in contemporary media.

A Qualitative Content Analysis of How “Snapped: Killer Couples” Portray Female Perpetrators Versus Their Male Partners

Abstract

Half of Americans consume true crime content with morbid human curiosity attributing to its popularity in the modern sphere. This research study delves into how the portrayals of men and women homicide perpetrators differ in the true crime show “Snapped: Killer Couples” and how directorial decisions (i.e., what the director felt was important to re-enact) shaped the gendered narrative of the perpetrators. The team utilized qualitative content analysis, creating a codebook to use when watching the show about the possible existing differences in male/female representation in criminal media. The codebook consisted of categories such as perpetrator gender, race, relationship to the partner in crime, homicide type, motivation, relationship to victim, competency, sexual orientation, and media frames. The research is still being conducted, but preliminary implications based on initial coding has shown that, even in the modern sense, women tend to be portrayed in true crime media as either villainous or victims. The villainous woman is demonized by the media and seen as monstrous, possibly seductive to their male partner; the victimized woman is subject to the will of her partner, an illness, or “hysteria” in response to outside masculine sources.

Keywords: Gender, Crime, Media