Home

QUESTION: sexism in reality television statistics

Submitted by Anonymooose on Mon, 07/27/2009 - 2:41pm
question / pregunta: 

Does anyone have any statistics about the destructive, sexist stereotypes projected by reality television? Or any idea of how much profit media conglomerates make off of reality television (through ads, ratings, etc)?
Thanks and peace!

Answers

Answer posted by: jbeek

Here are a couple of academic papers related to stereotypes and reality televison that could serve as starting points for that aspect of the question.

There's an article in the Internet Journal of Criminology here, and another paper presented at the International Communication Asociation's May 2008 meeting here.
Both have citaions which could be followed for further resources.

I'm posting these as starting places while I have the links up. Hopefully we will have more to follow.

Answer posted by: jim miller

To get free sites on the Web, you can try USAsearch.gov for state as well as federal websites, reports, studies, hearings, etc. Possible searches would include: "reality tv" sexist (3 hits), "reality tv" sexism (2 hits); and "reality shows" profit* (50 hits). USAsearch seems to be a bit more predictable with the * (truncation) than Google is. Compare Google's only 44 hits for: "reality shows" profit* site:gov but 70 for "reality shows" profitability site:gov

You can also use site:edu to try to get more "official" or at least better documented information. Google gets at least 345 unique hits for "reality shows" profitability trends site:edu and 14 for "reality shows" "average revenue" site:edu. These site:edu, site:ac.uk, sites may also have a lot more research on sociological issues such as sexism, racism, or stereotypes in general. For example, "reality shows" sexist site:edu gets 137 unique hits in Google. We do have to beware that "site:edu" does not guarantee scholarship. Many students and staff are quite free to have their own blogs or personal websites hosted on a university server, and "peer review" is definitely not the rule for such sites.

If you are near an academic or large public library, there will almost certainly be onsite access to commercial full-text databases. If you "Select a Field" TX-All Text, in its Advanced search, Academic Search Premier (Ebsco) gets 35 hits for the search: "reality shows" and sexis*, and 33 for: "reality shows" and profitability; Business Source Complete gets 57 for: "reality shows" and profitability. Very many academic libraries will give you onsite access to the very scholarly full text journal database JSTOR. There are many options for JSTOR, and only the very largest places can afford the entire package. Here at University of Maryland, our JSTOR package gets 20 hits for the search: "reality shows" AND stereotyp* and 9 for: "reality shows" AND sexis*. There are many other possible databases, notably Communication & Mass Media, SocIndex, Web of Science (Social Sciences Citation Index), and even ScienceDirect because of its very large body of full text.

Jim Miller
jmiller2@umd.edu