What Can Mass Media Research Teach us about Sex and the City
- Taylor Bowen
- Apr 20, 2022
- 4 min read
Do you like art or math? Are you right-brained or left-brained? When you research a topic or participate in a debate, do you want to focus on numbers, graphs, and tables? Or do you want to? Expresses yourself in words and stories? Do you look at a problem through analyzed math and statistical analysis? Or do you analyze by summarizing and interpreting a broader idea? Do you prefer quantitative research or qualitative research?
Quantitative vs. qualitative research may be tricky to wrap your head around, especially if you are a visual person. Scribbr's charts help understand the difference. It is essential you not only understand the difference but can spot it during your research. Choosing one research method over another can completely change how we reflect on an issue.
Let's break these topics down a little further. According to the University of Florida Professor Dr. Victor Evans, Quantitative research characteristics are traits like testing a hypothesis, expressing your idea in numbers, using large sample sizes, and relying heavily on math/statistical analysis. Qualitative research requires you to formulate the hypotheses (rather than test them), express your big idea in words (rather than numbers), and use smaller sample sizes. Finally, they summarize/interpret their findings. Picking one research method over the other can completely change your findings.
Let's look at our favorite show, Sex and the City. Who do you think has the most sex out of our four leading ladies, Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, or Charlotte? Our main protagonist Carrie Bradshaw writes her weekly article about where the show gets its name from. A qualitative research approach would be if I stated, "Well, it must be Carrie. It is her show, after all!" Then I watched the season trailers or talked with my friends to back it up. Finally, my conclusion would be interpreting why we believe we have come to this hypothesis.
From left to right: Charlotte, Carrie, Miranda, Samantha
In this instance, a quantitative research approach has dramatically different findings. If you test the hypotheses by all episodes of the show and both movies, you will find Carrie is not in the number one spot. Charlotte, the "girl next door," often performs Carrie in many instances. I was not expecting this since a significant plot point for Charlotte is how innocent and inexperienced she is compared to the other three girls. Carrie is not only booted out of the top spot by Samantha, but Miranda takes second in all but the final season. Utilizing a larger sample size and using math/statistical analysis expressed in numbers completely changes how we look at the question.
Now I don't want you to think that this means quantitative research is always the way to go. Looking through the University of Florida's library, I found two published papers that each use these methods. "Postfeminist 'Islamophobia': The Middle East is so 1980s in Sex and the City: The Movie 2" and" 'Forget about them': The invisible and fashionable Muslim women of Sex and the City 2" are two articles I never thought I would be reading on a Friday night, but their research methods made them hard to put down.
"Postfeminist 'Islamophobia': The Middle East is so 1980s in Sex and the City: The Movie 2" by Niall Richardson examines how we look at everything in the NYC scenes of the movie as fashionable and chic, yet the second the girls step foot in the "middle east" ( Abu Dhabi) they play up that everything is dated and not in a "vintage way." Richardson does this by looking at fashion trends during the 80s and comparing them to the "current trends" depicted in the "middle east" during the movie. Although a topic like fashion seems typically very abstract, Richardson accomplished a quantitative research approach through the large sample size and expressing the trends through data rather than general ideas. This approach makes a broad topic seem a little more manageable to an uninformed reader wanting to learn about a new topic.
In 'Forget about them': The invisible and fashionable Muslim women of Sex and the City 2" the author Mariam Esseghaier takes a much more critical study to approach to the fashion and beauty topic. Much of her article discusses the way Muslim women are used as a tool to displace Muslim culture and the adverse effects this movie had on Muslim women's culture and their power structure. The journal also focuses on the film's idea that Muslim women are "fashion oppressed." Essenghaier writes much about formulating her hypothesis on what Sex and the City 2 did to fashionable Muslim women. She expresses her view through words and interprets her own story and the story of a few she selected. This small sample size is a tell-tale sign of qualitative research.
When it comes to a topic as broad as fashion and beauty I tend to gravitate towards research methods that more closely align with qualitative qualities. It is hard to put statistical analysis on ideas of fashion and feminism. However, when looking to solve less broad problems, like who uses the most profanity in the show, I want to see some quantitative research!
If you'd like to reach either of the articles mentioned above yourself, check them out below!
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