The aim of my questionnaire is to find out if there is a gender difference in people's attitudes to the media.

Before I wrote up my final questionnaire I piloted a questionnaire to obtain the most suitable questionnaire for my study. I wrote a pilot questionnaire and gave it to various members of my family to fill out and give me feed back so that I could improve on it. They could not see anything wrong with my pilot survey but I decided to add an extra question into my final questionnaire.

A copy of my final questionnaire follows on the next page.

Questionnaire - The mass media

The following questionnaire is an inquiry on people's view of the media and is completely confidential, so please answer all questions honestly. For questions 2 to 14 please circle the correct number depending on how strongly you agree with the answers on each side of the scale.

) What is your gender? (please tick one box)

? Male

? Female

2) How influential do you think the media is on peoples views?

3) How important is the media to you?

4) How honest do you think the media is?

5) How do you think violence is portrayed in the media?

6) How sexist is the media?

7) How racist is the media?

8) How homophobic is the media?

9) How valuable do you find the information in Tabloid newspapers?

0) How valuable do you find the information in Broad Sheet newspapers?

1) How do you view the expectations of women in the media?

2) How do you view the expectations of men in the media?

3) Which gender do you think is under more pressure to conform to these media expectations?

Questions types

In my questionnaire I used mostly ten point semantic differential scales for the answers to my questions. I chose to use this type of scale for my answers because it allows the subjects feelings on the question to be answered appropriately.

Procedure

I conducted my questionnaire in my sixth form; I handed out copies of the questionnaire to ten males and ten females in the canteen. I gave the questionnaires to one person at a time and stayed with them until they had filled them in. By doing this I was able to explain to the subjects how to answer the questions so that they would not make mistakes, thus increasing the ecological validity.

Results

Male results

0 point scale

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

0

Question 1

3

1

2

Question 2

3

2

1

2

Question 3

2

4

2

Question 4

2

4

2

Question 5

2

2

1

2

2

Question 6

1

3

2

Question 7

3

2

Question 8

2

2

2

Question 9

2

2

2

Question 10

2

2

4

Question 11

2

2

3

Question 12

2

3

2

Question 13

3

2

3

As you can see from the table above there is no question which has a large amount of people answering in the same way; most of the answers have a pretty even distribution. Something else that I have noticed is that at least one person answered in the average answer (5) of every question. Although my male subjects were split in noticing sexism in the media, the majority recognized women as having more pressure on them to comform to media expectations.

Female results

0 point scale

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

0

Question 1

3

2

Question 2

2

2

2

Question 3

2

2

2

Question 4

2

1

2

4

Question 5

2

4

Question 6

2

2

Question 7

2

2

3

Question 8

3

1

2

Question 9

3

2

2

Question 10

2

2

2

2

Question 11

4

2

2

Question 12

2

2

Question 13

2

2

4

As you can from the table above the female subjects answers were more distributed; no one answered 5 for every question, showing that they were probably taking the questionnaire more seriously, increasing validity (answering as 5 is like 'sitting on the fence', not choosing either answer). None of my subjects thought that there was more pressure on men to conform to media expectations.

Conclusion

You can't really draw any solid conclusion from my results. I have shown that there is no solid connection between attitudes to the media and gender. So it could be interpreted that differences in people's views to the media are down to personal differences rather than gender differences.

From my conclusion you can see that none of my predictions were correct. Men seemed to have more of an idea of prejudices in the media than I gave them credit for. Also men seemed to be just as aware of media expectations as women are.

Evaluation

The sampling method that I have used in my investigation is not a good one. Giving questionnaires to random people in your surrounding environment may result in some sort of bias in your answers (like minded people usually hang around together). The population that I took my sample from (students only) isn't very broad; the majority of students in my sixth form will be from a working class background. I could not make any firm conclusion from my results, I found that there was no clear link between peoples attitudes to the media and there gender. To expand my investigation I could have investigated links between people's attitudes to the media and differences (for example ethnicity or social class). My questionnaire only contained thirteen questions, to get a better picture of my subjects' views on the media I could have asked more questions. My questionnaire was comprised of 'ten point semantic differential scale' type answers, to get a better insight into peoples attitudes I could have included different types of answering styles (for example a 'five point likert scale' type answers).

Daniel Comey Psychology Mr. Stone