Advertising's effects on men's gender role attitudes

Sex Roles: A Journal of Research,  May, 1997  by Jennifer Garst,  Galen V. Bodenhausen

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Materials

Stimulus Magazine Advertisements. Stimulus materials were professional quality, color, full page mock magazine advertisements that pictured a "typical" male product user along with his written biographical profile. The quality and format of the stimulus materials were modeled from Dewar's[R] scotch advertisements that were circulating in magazines at the time the study was run. Advertisements featuring two different products were developed for each of six conditions. For each condition, one advertisement pictured a cup of coffee being filled with "Delvecchio's gourmet coffee" (Scenario 1), while the other featured a computer represented to be an "EPS Technologies personal computer" (Scenario 2). Both advertisements listed the typical male product user's name (e.g., John Hadon), home (e.g., Chicago, Illinois), hobbies (e.g., enjoys going to concerts), recent achievement (e.g., received a service award from the social club he belongs to), name of the product he uses (e.g., Delvecchio's gourmet coffee), outlook on relationships, philosophy regarding marriage, age, and profession.

For each product advertisement, the content of the model's "outlook on relationships" as well as "philosophy regarding marriage" varied across the highly androgynous, mildly androgynous, and traditionally masculine media portrayals. Four masculine and/or feminine interests/role behaviors were used to form both the outlook on relationships and philosophy regarding marriage categories. Each behavior or interest had been previously identified by Orlofsky, Ramsden, and Cohen (1982) in the Revised Sex-Role Behavior Scale (SRBS-2) as more typical of one gender but considered desirable by both genders.

The age similarity of the male media models, compared to the participants, was also varied. Half the participants viewed advertisements that pictured a young, male college student who was represented to be either 18 or 20 years of age. The other half examined advertisements that pictured an older, male retiree represented as either 65 or 66 years old. Photos of both the younger and older targets for each scenario were matched on perceived level of masculinity in previous pilot testing. Attributes other than outlook on relationships, philosophy regarding marriage, age, and profession were held constant within each product advertisement. Based on pilot testing, the common text of both scenarios across the six experimental conditions was matched based on perceptions of the models' similarity to the viewer, attractiveness, masculinity, femininity, and power.

Gender Attitude Inventory (GAI). A total of thirty-four items were selected from the 109 items of the Gender Attitudes Inventory (Ashmore, Del Boca, & Bilder, 1995) to measure participants' attitudes toward relationships between men and women and the roles played by men in contemporary American society.(3) Responses were assessed using a 7-point scale with "1" signifying "agree strongly" and "7" signifying "disagree strongly." Items were worded so that agreement sometimes reflected traditional attitudes and sometimes reflected less traditional attitudes. The items were recoded so that higher values always indicated more liberal (i.e., less traditional) attitudes. Items from six of the fourteen subscales identified by Ashmore et al. were used: (1) sexual initiative (e.g., the initiative in dating should come from the man); (2) female superiority (e.g., women are morally superior to men); (3) traditional stereotypes (e.g., men are more competitive than women); (4) chivalry (e.g., chivalrous gestures toward women on the part of men should be encouraged); (5) family roles (e.g., the husband should have primary responsibility for the support of the family); and (6) differential work roles (e.g., all occupations should be equally accessible to both men and women).