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COMM 1307 - Media & Society (Olson)

Assignment #5

Green icon of a television setFor this assignment, select one channel to watch for a consecutive three-hour portion of the television broadcast day. You will want to:

  • Create a commercial log.  Be sure to list the type of commercial (snacks, cars, feminine products, etc.). 
  • Is there a pattern as to what types of commercials are shown during certain types of programming?  What kind of audience are the programming and commercials targeting?
  • Be sure to include SCHOLARLY research on advertising to help make sense of your results (with proper citations).

Finding Scholarly Articles

Finding the right scholarly articles for your research is a multi-step process. You can follow these steps to help you find relevant articles for this assignment. But keep in mind that while there are steps to follow, this is not necessarily a linear process. You might have to repeat steps a few times and go back and forth as you find new information.

Step 1: Identify behaviors and stereotypes in the television programs

  • As you analyze the three hours of television that you watch, make note of any behaviors or stereotypes related to age, gender, race, ethnicity, geography, etc.

Step 2: Match the program behaviors and stereotypes to the target audience of the program

  • Consider how the behaviors or stereotypes you've observed in the shows you watched might connect back to the target audiences. For example, if Grey's Anatomy characters are predominantly white with a high socioeconomic status, do you think the target audience is the same?

Step 3: Formulate a research question

  • For a research question, you'll want to consider how the advertisements relate to the target market. Do the advertisement appeal predominately to a specific gender, race, or socioeconomic target market?  If so, what kind of advertisements did you see?

Example research question:

  • Do advertisers target white women with beauty advertisements during prime time television dramas?

Step 4: Identify keywords from your research question

  • Once you have an initial research question, identify the key concepts in your question that you can then use as search terms.

Example search terms:

  • Race, Female/Women, Beauty/Attraction, Television/Prime-Time/Drama, commercials/advertisements

Step 5: Search for scholarly articles in one of the following databases

  • Use the search terms you identified to find relevant articles, making sure to try different combinations of keywords to see which yield the best results.