This report describes a follow-up study of the persistence of the effects of the FREESTYLE experiment, which had indicated that this television series was capable of bringing about large changes in the sex role orientation of 9-to-12-year-olds. Designed to determine whether the effects associated with a 4 month media intervention could be found to…

To test the proposition that television content can teach sex-typed behaviors and attitudes, this study presented children of two ages (third grade and eighth grade) with one of two sets of television commercials. The first set contained women engaged in nontraditional occupations outside the home. The second set showed traditional women in their…

Presents a literature review that addresses sexism and gender misrepresentation on "Sesame Street," the world's most popular children's television program. Discusses the show's content and the correlation between increased exposure to "Sesame Street" and viewers' changes in attitude and behavior. Suggests the presence of gender…

This report, the second in a series of six reports on television advertising and children, presents the results from a series of experimental studies designed to test children's intentional and incidental learning from television commercials. A total of 400 elementary school students of varying socioeconomic status participated in the study, with…

Children from grades one through six judged commercially produced advertisements, specially produced "pseudocommercials," and verbal descriptions as better suited to advertise a feminine or masculine sex-typed toy. Comprehension of sex-typed connotations was predicted by home television viewing patterns but not by general knowledge of sex…

Television teaches children gender-specific behaviors, attitudes, characteristics, and personality traits. Research indicates that by observing male and female characters on television, children learn to label certain characteristics and behaviors as masculine or feminine and to assign traditional sex-role stereotypes to careers. Content studies…

Television programming has long been recognized as an effective method of educating children. This paper investigated the degree of exposure an educational children's program, Sesame Street, gave to female and male characters and the extent to which these characters were stereotypically portrayed. Children's Television Workshop produces 110…

A study examined whether television's stereotypical portrayals of men and women affected children's sex role preferences. The subjects, 105 fifth and 70 eighth grade students from a predominately black urban school in the southern United States, were assigned to see one of three versions of a videotape of a family drama in which male and female…

The five research papers that comprise this document report on research into the impact of the inception of television reception on residents of a Canadian town, "Notel." The introductory section tells how Notel and two other similar Canadian towns that already had television reception were studied just before Notel received television…

Six classes with 20 students per class participated in a study to determine the effects of television programing's stereotyped images on children's autonomy (independence of thought and action). Classes of first and second grade students and two classes of fifth grade students were the experimental groups, while the third and sixth grade classes…

Project "Freestyle" involved the development of prototypical television materials and a comic book intended to combat sex-role stereotyping in the career-related attitudes of nine to twelve-year-old children. This paper reports the results of four types of research conducted during the early development of the television series to…