Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT
This study was a replication of one that investigated sex-role stereotyping of occupations and behaviors of music-video characters shown on MTV in 1987. It employed a random sample of 91 MTV music videos broadcast in 1993. This follow-up study found a continuation of male and female characters shown in sex-typed jobs. However, there was somewhat less sex-role stereotypical behavior in the second study, with males still more adventuresome and violent, but no longer more aggressive, domineering, and victimized than females. Female characters were still more affectionate, nurturing, and sexually pursued than males, but were not found to be more dependent, fearful, and in pursuit of others sexually than were males (as they were in the initial study). As was the case in the first study, a large percentage of female characters wore revealing clothing.
Music videos (like all media of popular culture) reflect societal norms, but (as Bennett and Ferrell, 1987, pointed out) also communicate to young viewers ideas about how to behave and which careers to pursue. Certainly the mass media, particularly television, reinforce sex-role stereotypes held by adolescent audiences (Beuf, 1974; Greenberg, 1982; Morgan, 1982). In the early 1990s, almost 60% of television homes received the MTV (Music Television) channel in their basic cable service, according to MTV Research (as cited in Signorielli, McLeod, & Healy, 1994), with 28% of the audience less than 18 years old, as reported by Cable Network Profiles (as cited in Pardun & McKee, 1995). Earlier surveys of adolescents found that about 80% of them watched MTV, with the average viewing time from 25 minutes to more than two hours per day (Brown, Campbell, & Fischer, 1986; Nielsen, as cited in Kubey & Larson, 1990; Sun & Lull, 1986).
The purpose of this study was to replicate a content analysis by this researcher (Seidman, 1992) that investigated sex-role stereotyping of occupational roles and behaviors of music-video characters shown in video clips on MTV, the preeminent rock-video cable channel, in the early 1990s to find what changes, if any, had occurred since the initial study. The first study examined the content of MTV before its management changed the channel's format to include less "album-oriented rock" music (Denisoff, 1988) and more rap music (DeCurtis, 1990). Whereas in...