(Re) Designing Women: A Content Analysis of Female Characters on American Sitcoms

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.