A conceptual replication and extension of erving goffman's study of gender advertisements

The analysis of visual imagery in magazine advertising can be approached directly or indirectly insofar as gender messages are concerned. Using Goffman's theoretical underpinning, some of the more subtle clues regarding gender relations, gender stereotyping, and gender roles were explored. Over 1000 advertisements, selected from Good Housekeeping, Sports Illustrated, Time, MS, Gentlemen's Quarterly, and Rolling Stone were content analyzed using Goffman's decoding behavior methodology. The results demonstrated that the feminine touch and ritualization of subordination were fairly often discovered; licensed withdrawal occurred somewhat; and relative size, function ranking, and the family very infrequently. The findings reported were provocative and suggestions for future research are enumerated.Because of the feminists the most ordinary verbal exchange between men and women now reverberates with new meaning; the most simple gesture, familiar ritual, taken-for-granted form of address has become a source of new understanding with regard to relations between the sexes and the social forces at work behind those relations (Gornick 1976, p. vii)The authors would like to express their gratitude to Tracy Ellman for his assistance in this research project, and to Richard A. Stivers, Raymond L. Schmitt, and William L. Tolone for their theoretical and methodological contributions.     

The role of phonology in reading comprehension: Implications of the effects of homophones on processing sentences with referentially dependent categories

Two experiments investigated whether phonological representations are activated in the processing of anaphors in reading, and if they are, whether they play a role in the initial (first-pass) processing of the sentence or in review (second-pass) processes. Subjects made sentence acceptability judgements for sentences that contained either verb-gaps or indefinite and personal pronouns (overt anaphors). All sentences contained homophones. Half of the semantically unacceptable sentences were phonologically plausible if the homophones were inserted in the gap (e.g. The children sleighed in the winter, and the murderer in cold blood) or used as the referent of the pronoun (e.g. There is a sale on at the store and I have one at the boat). The other half of the semantically unacceptable sentences were phonologically implausible. In both experiments, half of the subjects saw the sentences under normal viewing conditions (whole sentence condition); for the other half of the subjects the words of each sentence were presented sequentially in the centre of the video screen at the rate of 250 msec/word (RSVP condition). A large proportion of the phonologically implausible sentences in the first experiment contained phrases in the second clause which resulted in semantic “oddities” (e.g. The children sleighed in the winter, and the murderer in the jar); the sentences in Experiment 2 did not contain such oddities. In Experiment 1 subjects made more errors on the phonologically plausible than implausible unacceptable sentences with both verb-gaps and pronouns in the whole sentence but not in the RSVP condition. There was no effect of phonological plausibility in Experiment 2. As the effect of phonological plausibility was only seen in the whole sentence condition, and only when the sentences contained semantic oddities, these data suggest that phonological information was not used in the first-pass analysis of the sentence, but rather when the subject re-read the sentence to find the referent.     

Tests for equality of several alpha coefficients when their sample estimates are dependent

In a variety of measurement situations, the researcher may wish to compare the reliabilities of several instruments administered to the same sample of subjects. This paper presents eleven statistical procedures which test the equality ofm coefficient alphas when the sample alpha coefficients are dependent. Several of the procedures are derived in detail, and numerical examples are given for two. Since all of the procedures depend on approximate asymptotic results, Monte Carlo methods are used to assess the accuracy of the procedures for sample sizes of 50, 100, and 200. Both control of Type I error and power are evaluated by computer simulation. Two of the procedures are unable to control Type I errors satisfactorily. The remaining nine procedures perform properly, but three are somewhat superior in power and Type I error control.A more detailed version of this paper is also available.