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The question for my research project is as follows: How do college students feel about the way men and women are represented in commercials? I believe my question is feasible for the topic within itself is very controversial and there is no absolute answer, but a matter of opinions. I hope to gain information of how people react to their depictions, or do they even know what it is when they see it; and if they do understand, what is the best way to address this issue. I aim to perform deductive research by addressing some of the common strands I’ve found in other research. From this theory, I hope to collect data from my subjects and peers to see if they have similar opinions to make a general conclusion. The purpose of my study is to evaluate how people of the college age connect to the gender roles portrayed in society and differentiate whether or not they are buying into these roles or critiquing them. One of my main findings from the research is that more women than men are seen, or most often seen in commercials. To compensate for not being visibly seen, my data reflects that most students see more males playing the narration role instead of the most common roles like parent, entertainer, or sex symbol. Overall, my hypothesis is that women have more of a negative stigma in commercials than their male counterparts. I have chosen to gather my information from surveys and in depth interviews. I chose these two methods because I feel it will be more beneficial to gather information by asking students on UCLA campus about how they feel towards sex roles and how they are viewed in the media. I didn’t choose the other two methods because with this project there is now way of observing the participants and the experiment of showing participants different types of commercials would have been biased standpoints. I wanted to get a general idea of how young adults perceive the media: do we agree or disagree with their methods? The independent variable in this research is the college students from the different majors that participated. The dependent variable is the perceptions these students have built from viewing gender roles in commercials through my surveys and interviews. My population was the UCLA community because due to the time constraint, I felt this would be the best possible choice to receive data, another plus was with UCLA notable for its diverse student body, I could get a wide variety of responses. My sampling method was a combination of cluster and availability; I initially went to four different types of classes: math, art, science, and humanities but not many students wanted to participate, so due to time constraints I went to residents in building. While collecting data, I found that it was difficult getting enough people to want to take the survey in their leisure time; many were discouraged because of its three page length. Also, to kill time, some students did not answer all the questions or were checking the options subconsciously. Through my research, I found that my initial hypothesis was wrong; students do seem much difference between male and female roles and their positions I have found are more neutral and indifferent. However, for my personal interviews, my interviewees had more of a negative connotation of the portrayals seen in the media. I though it was interesting to know that neither of my groups of subjects had a similar perspective. Overall, my research was beneficial in that I found that not everyone has a particular stance on gender roles and whether one sex is viewed more positively or negatively than the other.
