From Adultescents to Zoomers: An Examination of Age and Gender in Prime-Time Television

Abstract

In sampling situation comedies and dramas airing on the six broadcast networks during the 2003-2004 prime-time season, this study examined the characterization of age and gender. Findings indicated that prime time over-represented individuals in their 30s and 40s and under-represented individuals 60 and older. Characters in their 20s enjoyed an extended adolescence, participating in more leisure and sexual activities than any other adult cohort. When characters 60 and older were seen at all, they wielded less occupational power, were less likely to be leaders, were less sexually active, and engaged in fewer leisure activities than younger characters. The authors concluded that prime-time offers a truncated view of adulthood.

Diversity and age stereotypes in portrayals of older adults in popular American primetime television series

“…These and similar theoretical perspectives have inspired an impressive amount of empirical research which analysed media representations of older adults over several decades in various contexts: on primetime TV (Vernon et al , 1991; Robinson and Skill, 1995; Signorielli, 2004; Lauzen and Dozier, 2005; Lauzen et al , 2007), in teen movies (Robinson et al , 2009), animated movies (Robinson et al , 2007; Zurcher and Robinson, 2018), children's books (Hollis-Sawyer and Cuevas, 2013), print advertisements (Miller et al , 1999; Williams et al , 2010) and TV commercials (Miller et al , 2004; Lee et al , 2007). With only scarce exceptions, previous studies have shown that older adults, especially women and ethnic minorities, are grossly under-represented ( e.g.…”

The look of ageing: Agelessness as post-feminist cool? - The aging female CEO in contemporary US TV series

“…Moreover, Lauzen and Dozier (2005) found in their 2002 study of representations of diff erent age groups in top-grossing fi lms that women over the age of 60 made up 8% of characters but 22% of the entire population (in contrast, women aged 30-39 made up 32% of fi lm roles but only 18% of the US population); in addition, in the 2004 study by Lauzen, Dozier and Rayes (2007), women accounted for 26% and men 74% of characters over 60 in prime time television. Most recently, in "Th e Status of Women in the Media 2014 Report", female characters over 65 made up only 3.7% of all characters in the top-grossing fi lms from 2012.…”

“…Moreover, older female characters have been represented as older at a much younger age than male characters, and, correspondingly, they have been represented as much older than male characters of the same age (Signorielli, 2001(Signorielli, , 2004Lauzen & Dozier, 2005;Lauzen, Dozier & Rayes, 2007;Barrett, Raphael & Gundersson, 2014;Women's Media Center, 2014, 2015Lauzen, 2016). Finally, in the wake of the seminal study by Gerbner et al (1980) of the misrepresentation of older people in the media, a range of studies has shown how negative representations of older people not only infl uence general attitudes toward older people but also older people's self-perception (for an overview, see Barrett, Raphael & Gundersson, 2014).…”

“…Moreover, in comparison with male characters, female characters over 60 occupied more passive positions (cf. Signorielli, 2001;Lauzen, Dozier & Rayes, 2007): they were less likely to work outside the home; and, if they were, their occupation was not mentioned as often. Th ey were portrayed as exercising less occupational power than male characters (25% of female characters vs. 50% of male characters), and they were portrayed as exercising less leadership (20.6% of male characters in contrast to only 8.3% of the female characters (Lauzen, Dozier & Rayes, 2007, p. 351).…”

Escaping to the present nostalgia and the uncanny pleasures of reinventing childhood

“…While each of these studies are interesting on their own in the way they attempt to explain the various types of play in the lives of adults, they are small in number and disconnected, with few, if any, commonalities in theory or methodology. While there are bodies of literature that have identified shifts in the way adults use specific media, there are very few studies that have observed a shift in the way adults play in general (Abramis, 1990;Lauzen, Dozier, & Reyes, 2007;Meyrowitz, 1984). Two years after the publication of Neil Postman's book The Disappearance of Childhood (1982), Joshua Meyrowitz argued that not only is childhood disappearing, but that this is only half of the 'story'; Meyrowitz argues that there is an overall "merging of childhood and adulthood" (1984, p. 19).…”