Final assignment

You'll find a scholarly study that you would like to recreate with new texts and data (you may choose any study from our textbook, from our class discussion, or from a journal).

For instance, you'll decide to model your own study based on a previous content analysis of a newspaper or you'll replicate a semiotic study of women's images in magazine ads by choosing updated ads. Your "shadow" project will quickly summarize this earlier study and its results; it will touch on one of the most important sources in this earlier study's literature review; it will explain your own new corpus and method; and it will report your findings and conclusion.

Your study should be double-spaced and between 750 and 1,000 words. It will have a cover sheet, your own original research and discussion (following the outline below), a references page that includes citations for the study you are shadowing and for one of its most important sources; and attachments with charts or samples of texts that you analyzed.

Here's an outline to use, as shown in this (shortened) example.

Cover sheet

Title:
Men all demure in ads, but not so with women

Two-sentence summary of findings:
Men in ads for television shows in two entertainment magazines were all depicted in demure dress. Women were depicted as partially clad or suggestively dressed, as well as demure.

Summary of the previous study:
The previous study by Reichert, Lambiase, Morgan, Carstarphen & Zavoina (“Beefcake & Cheesecake,” Spring 1999, Journalism & Mass Comm Quarterly) reveals that women are depicted more explicitly than are men in magazine ads, during a comparison of ads from 1983 and 1993. In this study of six magazines, women were three times more likely to appear in sexualized dress than men.

Its most important foundation literature and how it relates to your own project:
The most relevant study used by the previous study is the study by Soley & Kurzbard (“Sex in Advertising,” 1986, Journal of Advertising), which established used a similar coding scale, with these categories: demure, suggestive, partially clad, and nude. This earlier study, upon which the Reichert, et al., study is based, found that while the percentage of sexually oriented appeals in ads hadn’t increased, the amount of explicitness in the ways women were depicted had increased over time.

Corpus and method:
My corpus comprises all full-page ads for television shows, appearing in the July 29, 2005, issue of Entertainment Weekly and the Sept. 26, 2005, issue of People Magazine. The method is quantitative and qualitative content analysis, in which the main character in each ad was coded first as male or female, and then was coded for dress attributes. Descriptive analysis was used to discover information that cannot be captured in coding schemes.

Findings:
People magazine included 10 depictions of main characters in ads for television shows: 7 of women and 3 of men. All three depictions of men were coded as demure; 4 depictions of women were demure, 2 were suggestive, and 1 was partially clad. In Entertainment Weekly, there were 3 main characters coded: 1 man who was demurely dressed, and 2 women who were partially clad. Both magazines featured more depictions of women as main characters than men. A typical “partially clad” depiction could be found in an ad for Desperate Housewives, in which a main character was dressed in revealing evening wear (and reclining). Yet, demure depictions were captured for dramas such as Grey’s Anatomy and Commander in Chief, in which women were depicted in progressive roles.

Conclusions:
This mini-study fits much of the prior research on advertising depictions of men and women, in which females are much more likely to be depicted sexually and are more likely to be depicted more explicitly. A larger study of print ads for television shows could be attempted to see if this pattern continues, and this information could be compared to findings from studies of broadcast advertising for television shows. Are men ever depicted in sexual ways in these ads, and if so, when? It would also be interesting to discover whether the women depicted in television advertising, if dressed provocatively, were main characters in the shows themselves or were simply minor characters used sexually to attract attention to the show.
[Your report should be between 750 and 1,000 words.]

References:
[You'll list at least two.]

Attachments