Disruptive and Cooperative Interruptions in Prime-Time Television Fiction: The Role of Gender, Status, and Topic

Abstract

Speech characteristics of male and female characters in fictional television have received only scant attention in media content research. A content analysis ofprime-time television revealed that male characters were more likely to initiate disruptive interruptions than female characters whereas female characters were more likely to use cooperative interruptions than male characters. Such differences, however, were moderated by status differential between interactants and topic of conversation. Significant gender differences persisted only when the interrupters were of higher status than the interrupted and when the topic of the conversation was about work. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.Differential representation of men and women in the media has received a good deal of attention from mass communication researchers (e.g., Seidman, 1992;Signorielli, McLeod, & Healy, 1994). A shared theme in this line of research is that the way in which people, particularly women, are portrayed and treated in the media reflects and reinforces the commonly held beliefs about them in society at large (Gunter, 1995). However, although research on men's and women's physical and social images in the media abounds, the two sexes' speech characteristics in the media world are seldom investigated. This scarcity is especially surprising given the fact that language plays a central role in the creation and development of media characters. In view of this, the present research focused its attention on one particular conversational phenomenon, the interruption, in prime-time television fiction. A week's worth of prime-time sitcoms and dramas from the four major commercial networks were content analyzed. We investigated the patterns in which different types of interruptions are distributed between male and female television characters and examined the effects of status and conversation topic on the occurrence of interruptions and their interplay with gender effects.

The Role of Gender and Status in Communication between Doctors and Patients in Malaysian Contexts

“…It is also believed that not all the interruptions are intrusive and that they can be cooperative too (Coates 2011;Zhao and Gantz 2003). Zhao and Gantz (2003) proposed two kinds of interruptions, disruptive and cooperative interruptions, based on the purposes that they imply. In cooperative interruptions, interactants interrupt in order to show their support, agreement and also to ask for further explanation and clarification.…”