‘The mass media promotes gender stereotypes.’

The second relevant source is an American study of cartoons entitled 'Cartoons still stereotype gender roles' by Carol Spicher, B.A and psychologist Mary Hudak of Allegheny College; they propose that little progress has been made regarding the abolishment of stereotypes in the media and conclude that males are still portrayed as doctors and scientists while females are still in typical nurse and bathing beauty roles. This not only encourages stereotypes but also the concept of labelling becomes apparent within both contexts. Labels are an attempt at social control they can have the effect of stigmatising individuals by defining them in a dehumanised way; labels may be provisional, negotiable or rejected. I have included the concept of labels because it is closely related to stereotypes in that they can both be enormously influenced and affected by the mass media. Similarly the concept of norm setting can be linked. A norm is a shared expectation of behaviour therefore setting this expectation is to endorse it. This is a relevant because mass media has the opportunity to promote what it believes to be culturally desirable and appropriate through news stories and television programmes and nowhere is the debate about whether this happens more heated than within the topic of gender.

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Research Method -

To investigate my hypothesis I will use a non - directive unstructured interview technique. This means the information I collect will be relevant to my research and up to date. By employing the non - directive unstructured interview technique, I seek to establish a rapport with the interviewee to make them comfortable, once they seem no longer worried about being judged the questions relating to the research will slowly begin. An example of a typical question posed is-

'Do you think newspapers, televisions and such play a big role in your life?'

This type of open question and interview structure suits my hypothesis and concepts as it allows the individual to take the lead and tries to restrict bias, while gathering reality based in depth feelings and meaning. This method is qualitative and is preferred by phenomenologists / interpretivists who strive for a more natural approach to sociology by reporting information gained rather than interpreting it consequently during this research the findings will be reported rather than operationalised and therefore interpreted this approach will embodied an interpretivists method and compliment the nature of my hypothesis.

To gain access to the interviewees and therefore the sample population the stratified random sampling method will be used. This method allows for a representative sample of the population to be taken by division of the sampling frame in to groups. In this case there will be four groups of 50 people making 200 people sampled in total based on age and gender, these groups will be -

* Females, aged 16 - 20

* Males, aged 16 - 20

* Females, aged 36 - 40

* Males, aged 36 - 40

The sample will then be randomly selected from these groups and matched proportionally to the population as a whole. This method has been chosen because variables important to the research can be controlled. The variables of gender and age have been controlled for this research because I believe the responses from the different gender and age groups will differ significantly enough to affect any conclusion I may arrive at.

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Potential Problems -

This research has adopted a qualitative interpretivist approach and therefore incurs certain problems in relation to this. In relation to my hypothesis and concepts one problem is the inability to operationalise and measure peoples perceptions because of this limitation it is difficult to make comparison and therefore generalise from the information collected. Moreover the information provided could not be presented in the same way a positivist method could, this means the research could be unreliable and is definitely not of a traditional scientific basis. The information obtained through the interviews will be primary data therefore it is time consuming and reliant on participation of the subjects as a result it could be lacking in practicality. Further more there is an ethical issue with the interviews in that they are 'not natural social situations' and there is a possibility subjects could feel uncomfortable with the topic raised but because it is not a natural situation feel obliged to continue. This associates with the 'researcher effect' problem. This states that the attributes of the researcher for example personality gender or age all affect the type of response given by the subject. A final problem factor is that of time, the number of people to be interviewed will inevitably take a large amount of time this affects consistency of response because over time society changes affecting response. For example, responses to an interview before September 11th would differ significantly from responses after this date.

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Total word count = 1019