Graduate Education 1997 Abstracts
Graduate Education Interest Group
Leader of the PACK: An Analysis of Music Listeners’ Motivations Using the PACK Taxonomy • John R. Chapin, Rutgers University • The PACK Taxonomy of motives is used through a Uses and Gratifications perspective to test ten related hypotheses concerning adolescents’ motivations for listening to specific forms of popular music. For this pilot study, 63 structured interviews were conducted with students at a rural community college, to assess students’ motivations for listening to specific songs and specific forms of popular music and motivations for their current personal projects. The content of songs identified as favorites is also examined. As expected, adolescents’ personal projects are found to be contingent on age, and themes of favorite songs are found to be contingent on adolescents’ purposes for listening to them. Expected differences in PACK motives between specific popular music forms are not found.
Women and All the News That’s Fit to Print? • Mike Dorsher, University of Maryland • Content analysis is performed on a random sample of 224 New York Times editions, from 1966 to 1994, to see if the increasing number of women in the newsroom correlates with increased coverage of women on Times’ pages. The data show a significant increase (at alpha level of .05) in women’s bylines, pictures and references, but not obituaries, letters to the editor or op-ed pieces. There also is significant evidence that women write about women more than men do, but that men increasingly write about women when more of their newsroom colleagues are women.
Setting the Media Agenda: A Case Study • Kyle Huckins, University of Texas at Austin • Attempting to add to the growing literature on agenda building, the study uses agenda-setting theory as a model for testing the correlation between the agenda of the Christian Coalition and major U.S. newspapers. Highly significant relationships were found in cross-lagged correlations between the agenda of the group’s official newspaper and the media agenda, and statistically significant secondary effects were also noted. Less clear were measures designed to analyze contributing factors helping the Coalition set the media agenda.
From Wise to Foolish: The Changing Portrayal of the Sitcom Father from the 1950s to the 1990s • Erica Scharrer, Syracuse University • This content analysis of 72 episodes of sitcoms categorized by decade in which they were originally aired shows modern television fathers are more likely to be shown foolishly than in the past. The study shows that with the increased presence of women in the American workforce over time, sitcom fathers have gone from knowing best to knowing little. The portrayals are shown to have changed over time and to correlate with these extra media variables.
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