Constructing ideas of femininity: a contextual exploration of \nyoung girls’ advertising experiences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The research explores how pre-adolescent girls interact with representations of femininity in advertising messages, through an in-depth, mixed-methods and mainly qualitative approach with a purposive sample of primary school girls (age 8-11). The study evolves through three major stages: preliminary, main and follow-up. In the preliminary stage, the use of questionnaire, group sessions and projective techniques provided standardised information about girls’ life context, body image, personality, media habits and their embodiment of femininity (N=37). In the main stage, two rounds of peer-to-peer phenomenological interviews prompted by adverts elicitation were used to gain insight into girls’ response and interaction with adverts (N=31 first round; N=21 second round). In the final stage 16 participants took part in follow-up interviews, for clarification and amplification of themes emerging from the analysis. The phenomenological interviewing provides insights into girls’ reception of adverts in their own terms and their own words, while the contextualisation of participants’ advertising experiences is able to illuminate on contextual factors affecting girls’ critical abilities towards ideals of femininity presented in advertising and other media. Through a process of triangulation and systematic focused comparison, the analysis reveals how girls’ response to idealised portrayals of femininity in adverts is deeply intertwined with their broader media consumption. The main emerging results indicate that there is a fundamental difference in the way different sub-groups of girls perceive and respond to representations of femininity in adverts and media. In particular, by grouping the girls according to their lower or higher embodiment of stereotypical femininity, the analysis suggests a correspondence between girls’ stance towards femininity portrayals in adverts and their actual embodiment of femininity. From the context of a group of girls who consistently displayed higher critical skills, positive body image and a more fluid and diverse embodiment of femininity,'the analysis seems also to suggest a 'protective’ or 'buffering' influence exerted by certain contextual factors which are mainly located within the family. The original contribution to knowledge of the study is not in providing definite conclusions about advertising effects, but a valid basis to comprehend participants’ interaction and negotiation with different media’s portrayals of femininity in view of their particular world and frame of reference.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".