(Re) Designing Women: A Content Analysis of Female Characters on American Sitcoms
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Date
2017-05
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Hood College George B. Delaplaine Jr. School of Business
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Hood College Departmental Honors
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Abstract
Cultivation theory has shown that television impacts viewer’s perception
of reality, and research indicates that sitcoms are currently the most popular
sub-genre of television. Despite these findings, no study has been done to
analyze the portrayal of female characters on sitcoms and how this portrayal
may be impacting women’s views of their role in society. For this study a
content analysis was conducted on 100 sitcoms and 149 female characters, over
the last 60 years, to gain an understanding of the portrayal of female characters
on the most popular sitcoms of each decade. This study looks to answer three
main questions pertaining to the accuracy of the portrayal of women’s workforce
participation, the accuracy of the portrayal of working mothers, and how this
portrayal has changed in the past sixty years. These three questions are
addressed through the use of a logit regression analysis and by comparing the
data collected on the female characters to the United States actual labor
participation rates.