Research Symposium

BIO

I am a first year behavioral neuroscience and music dual-degree seeking student from Sarasota, Florida. My career goal is to research the intersection between these two fields while teaching at a university. However, I also find gender and communication studies fascinating and incredibly relevant! This interest drew me to the project I am currently working on, which involves studying advertisements to determine the portrayals of gender and household responsibility within them. Research, for me, is a tool that can be used to promote positive societal change, and I believe that examining gender/racial stereotypes and expectations within our society creates room for that growth.

Gendered Depictions of Household Care Responsibilities in Advertisements: A Quantitative Content Analysis

Abstract

Social learning theory and social cognitive theory both state that human behavior is greatly impacted by the representation of behaviors around them. The purpose of this study is to determine the representation of and expectations for behavior of demographic groups such as gender and race in household cleaning product advertisements. Quantitative content analyses are commonly used to determine the general distribution of characteristics across a set of media. Here, demographic based role assignment bias in cleaning product advertisements was measured using such an analysis. A reliable test was first built by a group of three coders through four rounds of practice coding and one round of reliability coding. Then, the advertisements to be featured in the final data analysis were coded and subsequently assessed to determine broader patterns. Bias in these advertisements has the potential to shape viewer’s expectations of individuals that fall into those demographics, thus pushing certain people into homemaker roles. There is a history in the United States of expecting women to be homemakers, and household product advertisements of the recent past consistently placed women characters into homemaker roles. It is necessary, then, to determine whether this pattern still exists, or if modern social justice movements have encouraged advertisement companies to produce a more diverse cast of characters, thus diversifying thought among viewers. Once the distribution of cleaning product advertisements is determined, it would be reasonable to pursue other forms of media, such as television and movies to truly understand the media atmosphere shaping American minds.

Keywords: Gender, Race, Advertisements, Communications