Renate L Welch, Aletha Huston-Stein, John C Wright & Robert Plehal: 'Subtle Sex-Role Cues in Children's Commercials'
Journal of Communication, 29[3], pp. 202-209, Summer 1979
A Review
Merris Griffiths
This study focuses on the portrayal and implications of gender stereotyping in advertising, so is consequently of huge relevance to my own studies. Advertisements typically emphasise how women use cosmetic and household products, while girls play with dolls and domestic implements. Boys, in contrast, play with vehicles and thrive on competition and war games, while men are generally associated with cars and sport. Consequently, men tend to be more aggressive, dominant and independent [p.202]. The main purpose of the study is explained in the introduction as being primarily an examination of the more subtle messages that exist within the medium of television, generally implied by the use of a particular form. Welch et al. define form as referring to the production techniques that are employed to achieve particular effects, such as cuts, zooms and animation, together with auditory features such as music, sound effects and narration.
They argue that if there are differences in the level of pacing and camera techniques used in advertising, subtle messages about masculine and feminine stereotypes must be implied. It is concerning for both researcher and audience that these messages may be so subtly conveyed that they are not easily recognisable to the viewer, and may therefore be integrated into the personality of an individual as some instinctive agenda of behaviour. Indeed, such an approach may prove more influential than more obvious content messages that can be easily recognised and, if necessary, disputed. Welsh et al. have chosen to concentrate their efforts on three main areas:
to determine whether or not such differences in presentational form actually exist;
to explore the possible relationship between advertising and aggressive behaviour, in terms of content;
to investigate the gender of narration often implicit within the content of advertisements; messages about masculine and feminine behaviour [p. 203].
Initially, they quote what they describe as the 'groundbreaking work' of sociologist Erving Goffman, whose famous book entitled Gender Advertisements is, as the title suggests, about the portrayal of gender stereotypes in advertisements. Goffman demonstrated how messages about authority and dominance are implied through features such as the arrangement of characters, visual and body orientation, and other cues that are only indirectly related to the product being advertised. It is possible to argue that such messages are acknowledged, even subconsciously, by those who view the advertisements, and may subsequently be incorporated into an individual's perception of the world, him/herself and others?
Welch et al. wrote this article as a portion of a much larger project, comprising what they describe as the identification and study of formal features in children's television programmes [p.203]. Naturally, if a particular programme is broadcast on a commercial channel, then a study of the advertisements that run in the commercial breaks is equally importance to the content of the actual programmes. In terms of programme content, they list the following points as most significant:
the level of action or activity [characters and inanimate objects];
pace;
visual/camera techniques [cuts, pans];
auditory techniques [dialogue, music] [p.204].
They set out to compare the differences between advertisements for toys directed at boys, those directed at girls, and those directed at both sexes. They decided who the intended audience for the product was on the basis of the sex of the child characters selling the product in the advertisements. That is to say, those advertisements with a concentration of girl-characters were intended, from the moment of their creation, to appeal specifically to girls. They stress that this criterion was more objective and separate from content than an analysis in terms of the sex-typed nature of the toy. Having collected together a number of advertisements, they selected a total of sixty sampled from weekday morning and Saturday morning time periods throughout the Autumn of 1977- twenty advertisements aimed at boys, twenty aimed at girls, and a further twenty appealing to both sexes. They also stress that their level of intercoder-reliability is an acceptable 80% for all the categories [p.204].
Having selected this range of advertisements, Welch et al. studied their content in terms of five main categories. I found their methods of study particularly useful in that I am also including a content analysis of advertisements in my own study. With each individual category, I have also included a discussion of the results they obtained in each case:
Action
Welch et al. broadly divide the concept of 'action' into two sub-categories - action by characters or animate action, and action by objects [particularly toys] or inanimate action. Their analysis is what can only be described as painstaking in that the degree of action was determined by coding and collecting three five-second time samples from each advertisement, at regular intervals of its duration. Once this task had been accomplished, the levels of activity were coded into four workable, if rather broad categories, as follows:
stationary with little or no movement
stationary, but with moving parts
moving through space slowly
moving through space rapidly
Had it been practical for the study, I feel that these categories should have been expanded upon slightly, to include options that more clearly define what is meant by unspecified terms such 'slowly' and 'rapidly', since one could argue that these are only relative terms and perceived differently by individuals. For the purpose of this analysis, however, these categories achieve what is intended. Overall, the results emphasise the already well-known fact that advertisements directed at boys contain a higher level of activity, particularly activity by toys that would otherwise be inanimate. For example: in an advertisement for Meccano construction sets, attention is generally focused on items constructed using the sets [usually cars] travelling at high speed. Interestingly, they found that there was little difference between their selection of advertisements in terms of the degree to which the characters moved, so disproving the conception that boys are generally shown participating in more action-packed activities than girls. Rather it is the products aimed at boys and not the boys themselves that are action-packed.
Pace
As far as an analysis of pace is concerned, Welch et al. discuss the idea in terms of two similarly broad categories, as follows:
variability of scenes i.e. cutting to new scenes not previously shown
total pace, consisting of the variability of scenes, as described above, as well as cutting back to familiar scenes and any change in the constellation of characters within or between scenes [p.205]
Pace was coded by counting the frequency of occurrence of the two categories above, within each advertisement. Overall, it was found that advertisements for boys contained more variability in the form of changes from one new scene to another; cuts that maintain interest and hold viewer attention. This does not seem surprising when one considers the features typically regarded as the format of advertisements for boys, often paced with tremendous variability, including a high-speed cutting rate, making it difficult to focus on the product being advertised! Once again, however, they also produced a rather intriguing result in terms of total pace, referring to the variety of scenes and characters used in any single advertisement. They found that there was actually no difference in total pace between advertisements aimed at girls and those for boys. It is arguable, therefore, that while the rate and pace of variability may be equal, the actual use of such elements in advertisements aimed at girls is less obvious than in those aimed at boys.
Visual Effects
With regards visual effects, Welch et al. refer specifically to camera techniques such as cuts, pans and trucks, zooms, fades and dissolves, and other visual effects. The frequency and duration of these effects were studied frame-by-frame for each advertisement. This is a procedure that I intend to include in my own content analysis of advertisements. The results obtained on this occasion were as expected in that advertisements for boys contained a higher cutting rate, while advertisements for girls contained more fades and dissolves. The former technique connotes action and speed, while the latter connotes greater tranquillity. This technique was echoed by the position of the camera view-finder at any one time. Advertisements for boys comprised abrupt, instantaneous shifts in view, while those for girls were slow and smooth. It also emerged that those advertisements classed as 'neutral', in terms of appeal to both boys and girls, ranked highest for special visual effects. Since this result is said to be neither expected or readily interpreted, Welch et al. make no further comment on it, and I also find it difficult to suggest any feasible reason for this finding.
Auditory Features
Auditory features, in this case, is the term used to describe anything that is heard within the duration of an advertisement. Welch et al. list the main auditory features under three sub-category headings as follows:
dialogue by characters [coded separately for male/ female, and adult/child]
narration, including talking and singing [coded separately, as above]
non-verbal features [such as non-speech vocalisation, sound effects, and foreground/background music]
The study of dialogue in advertisements produced many interesting results, and all may be regarded as supporting the stereotypical notions of gender. Initially, Welch et al. stress that differences in dialogue were an implicit part of their selection process, since all the sample-advertisements were selected on the basis of sex. A male spoken narrative was found to occur most frequently in neutral advertisement and those directed specifically at boys. A female narrative [both spoken and sung] occurred primarily in advertisements directed at girls. In addition, female characters were found to do little talking in neutral advertisements where boys were also present. The sex of any adult narrator [predominantly voice-over as opposed to visible speaker] was directly proportional to the sex of the children in the advertisements. That is to say, if the advertisement is intended to be for girls, then the narrator is likely to also be female; the same applies to advertisements directed at boys. The narrators in so-called neutral advertisements directed at both boys and girls were, however, found to be predominantly male, so this seems to suggest that men are allowed to reassert their dominance and authority over women, by being given greater opportunity to voice their views.
The degree of vocalisation, sound effects and any music [be that background or foreground] was collectively labelled 'noise' in this study. Welch et al. give predictable conclusions in this case, in that advertisements directed at boys were found to contain more 'noise', such as loud music and sound effects, than those advertisements aimed at girls. The latter were found to contain a greater level of soft music that is generally used as background to dialogue or narration. The underlying message here would seem to support the classic gender stereotypes of boys being loud, active and vigorous, and girls as subdued, quiet and meek.
Aggression
Welch et al. include a discussion of violence because they feel that it can be easily correlated with all the other features analysed so far. They were able to identify four different types of violence, as follows:
physical [such as hitting or threatening]
verbal [such as insults, derogation and angry comment]
object [such as hitting or attacking an object]
fortuitous destruction [injury to or destruction of an object, not directly 'caused' by the character, such as the use of explosions] [p.205]
It was discovered that instances of violence were almost exclusively limited to those advertisements directed at boys, with particular emphasis on object and physical violence. This discovery may be judged in the wider context of instances of male violence being far more likely than instances of female violence, and that men are far more likely to commit violent crime than women. It could be argued that the displays of violence seen in both advertisements and television programmes may be somehow incorporated into the male psyche from an early age, to link with those instances of male-orientated violent crime in adulthood. It is certainly possible that viewing violence can elicit aggressive behaviour. This is indeed a controversial issue and a cause for concern.
Welch et al. conclude their study with general discussion and a summary of their findings. They stress that the formal features seen in advertisements convey and reinforce some of the messages in the content, but at a subtle, pervasive and arguably 'dangerous' level. For example: those features unique to female advertisements, such as fades and background music, convey images that reinforce all those features assigned to the female stereotype- softness, gentleness, predictability, and inactivity. It is typically the case that males are portrayed as dominant, except in the domain that is reserved solely for females; the realm of dolls and domesticity. It is emphasised that the stereotypes are maladaptive in both cases [p.208]. Finally it is argued that the messages are likely to be passively and unconsciously accepted by the viewer simply because they are so subtle. This study is relevant to my own work in that it seems to lay bare the very foundations at the heart of how children begin to perceive their own and others position in a society continually stratified in terms of gender issues.
