The Portrayal of Men and Women in British Television Advertisements: A Review of 7 Studies Published Over a 12 Year Period

A good deal of this literature was inspired by McArthur and Resko’s [2] study analysing American television commercials. The coding categories devised for the content analysis in this paper formed the basis of nearly all subsequent research and this modest study has to date over 70 citations.The essential methodology of the study was replicated in other countries [12,13]. Furnham and Mak [1] reviewed 14 studies done up to the end of the century. They found evidence of cross-cultural/national similarly in terms of stereotyping on such categories as credibility, age and argument-made while others like location showed much greater variety. By-and-large, sex-role stereotyping was more prevalent the more traditional the country in terms of social and religious values.