Grace Cho – Associate Professor, Psychology
In my Parenting and Child Development in Diverse Families course (Psych 350), we analyzed two forms of children’s media (books & cartoons) for portrayals of families and family diversity (i.e., diversity of family structure, parental/gender roles, racial/ethnic make-up). This was a collaborative project conducted with all students in the class. We generated a list of popular cartoons (N=33) and children’s books (N=87) that were accessible online/streamed (e.g., youtube, netflix), created coding systems together. Students then split up both modes of media to code individually and submitted their data on a shared google sheet. The merged data was analyzed using SPSS and results were posted on our Moodle discussion forum, to which students commented and discussed with one another interesting patterns and insights. This project illustrated quite powerfully how traditional images of families continue to predominate children’s media even while no longer representative of the diversity of U.S. families (e.g., mothers were more likely to be portrayed as caregivers and in domestic contexts than fathers, multi-racial families and same-sex parents were rarely portrayed). Moreover, we found modern-day cartoons depicted family diversity more than children’s books did, and portrayed less sex-stereotyped images of parents and children. These findings have important implications for how and what children learn about families. The project allowed students hands-on experience coding media across multiple modes and conducting psychological research in a flexible, virtual yet still highly collaborative manner.
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Class Project: Psych 350 |
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SPSS |
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