The Portrayal of Men's Family Roles in Television Commercials [1] - Statistical Data Included

Sex Roles: A Journal of Research,  Sept, 1999  by Gayle Kaufman

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

Past research tells us that men are rarely shown in domestic or paternal roles. However, this paper goes beyond previous studies by not only examining gender differences in day part, product type, location, and domestic activities, but also differentiating between men and women with children. Further, the investigation of child care and other activities with children is enhanced by delving into the more complex patterns that occur when the child's age and gender are taken into account. Therefore, the Following research questions guide this study. How are men and women involved with children? In what kinds of activities do they participate? Does this participation vary depending on child's age and gender? Given past research, the following hypotheses are proposed.

(1) Women are expected to be more involved with children, especially in child care tasks, than men.

(2) Men will be more likely to play with children than care for them.

(3) Men are expected to be more involved with male children than female children.

DATA AND METHOD

Commercials were videotaped over a period of 1 week from November 12 to November 20, 1995. Twelve hours of three day parts--Sunday football, daytime, and prime time--were recorded in order to obtain a sample of commercials viewed to various extents by men and women. Commercials during Sunday football were recorded from 1:00 to 7:00 PM (Eastern time) on two consecutive Sundays. Each day 3 hr of NBC and 3 hr of FOX (the two stations that carried Sunday football at that time) were recorded. The three major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) were represented twice each for both daytime and prime time. Daytime commercials were drawn solely from soap opera programs and were recorded from 2:00 to 4:00 PM on ABC and CBS for 2 weekdays each and from 1:00 to 3:00 PM on NBC for 2 weekdays. [3] Prime-time commercials were recorded from 9:00 to 11:00 PM on ABC, CBS, and NBC, 2 nights each.

Only national commercials were selected. No local commercials, public service messages, or commercials for other television shows, movies, or videotapes were used in this analysis. This procedure resulted in 1061 commercials--277 during football, 529 during daytime, and 255 during prime time. This sample comes disproportionately from daytime commercials. This is probably due to the greater number of commercials shown during daytime than other times, given the same amount of time. [4] All network commercials, including repeats, were coded. Exposure to an idea is the focus here and as such repeats were included (see Craig, 1992b). [5] There were two coders for all commercials. To assess reliability, an agreement coefficient was calculated for each coding category (Krippendorff, 1980). The agreement coefficients were all greater than .98, indicating a high degree of reliability.

Central Figure

The unit of analysis is the individual character. Central figures are adults featured in a commercial. Up to two central figures were coded for each commercial. If there were more than two adults, the two most prominent were chosen for coding. Commercials in which there were no adult central figures were not coded. The resulting sample size of characters is 944. Most of these characters appear to come from a middle-class background and are non-Hispanic white, with an underrepresentation of minorities.