Situations of Viewing: Class, Gender and the Everyday Practices and Processes of Watching Television
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The gender and class one brings to viewing are factors in what meanings are generated by viewers and what modes of viewing they employ. I have attempted to get at this process from both sides, to investigate the impact of the viewer's class and gender on their viewing, but also to look at how class and gender are represented to these viewers. This research investigates the salience of class and gender to the viewing process among viewers who are also class and gender identified. The data collected for this research comprise four distinct sets: I) a background questionnaire, 2) participant observation during prime-time television viewing, 3) focus group interviews, and 4) individual interviews. The research participants were drawn from the student population of a large Canadian University located in Southern Ontario. These data are rich with insights into the process of viewing. There remains a paucity in the literature of research on male viewership and of comparative research on class, gender and viewership which utilizes both male and female research participants. My research addresses these gaps. There are essentially three chief fmdings of this research. First, there is a common conceptualization among the research participants of working-classness as something visible or notable, while middle-classness and the nuclear family are defmed as normal, despite not being the reality for a majority of actually situated viewers. Second, and related, is that working-class participants have a better developed and clearer understanding of structural class inequality than middle-class participants. Nevertheless, they express a desire to achieve a middle-class lifestyle as depicted on TV. Third, women reading women on TV were seen to both accept and reject these messages. There was an indication of both pressure to conform and protest against such impossible ideals of femininity. Men, on the other hand appear to accept ideal gender depictions on TV as unrealistic and unattainable and merely the province of fantasy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".