CRGS at work

Opening the door on the Media Lab at the CRGS, images of Bart Simpson leering, Buffy the Vampire Slayer fixing her hair before punching out a date gone awry, or Rachel kissing a friend played by Winona Ryder are likely to be seen on large monitors. Graduate students from the Human Sexuality Studies Program at SFSU are watching attentively. They are in the process of coding some of the 200 shows watched by teenage respondents in the “Television Consumption and Adolescent Sexual Activity” study that is part of the Adolescent Sexuality Project at CRGS. In this study, Team Media is analyzing two waves of survey, television program and focus group data from adolescents aged 13-18 to evaluate the relationships between watching sexual content on television and sexual attitudes and behaviors. A unique characteristic of this study, one of four funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Development, is our focus on the ways and contexts in which teens “consume” television programming may be significant in associations between what they watch and what they do, including how much they relate to the main characters, what genre the sexual content is, and with whom they are watching. We have also developed a novel approach to conceptualizing and coding sexual content, focusing not only on sex acts and talk but also on representations of what we call a “heterosexual script,” the unwritten but pervasively known “rules” about how boys and girls are supposed to be in the development of romantic relationships and sexual experiences.