Skip to Main Content
 

Global Search Box

 
 
 
 

Files

File List


Reinhard_Dissertation_2008.pdf (3.46 MB)

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

Gendered Media Engagings as User Agency Mediations with Sociocultural and Media Structures: A Sense-Making Methodology Study of the Situationality of Gender Divergences and Convergences.

Reinhard, CarrieLynn D.
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1404816397

Abstract Details

2008, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Communication.
Across many approaches to media studies, little has been done to understand how the various aspects of men and women's involvement with media products coalesce. A narrow focus on gender differences perpetuates a conceptualization of people as always man or woman, determined by biological, religious, psychoanalytical, societal, and/or cultural definitions. The deficit indicates a need for comprehensive studies to explore the whats, hows and whys of men's and women's engaging with media products that were either meant for them or for the other gender. The problem of focusing on gender differences is related to the problem of how people's engaging with the media has been studied. The process of engaging with a media product is complex, with a variety of material, aka structural, and interpretive, aka agentic, factors interacting that must be studied to understand the process. Often times a single study will focus on one particular aspect of this process, assuming the nature of the others, and in these assumptions gender stereotypes can take root. The purpose of this study was to understand individuals' experiences with gendered media that was meant for theirs and the other gender. Using the dialogic interpretive/performative model of the gendering process as the framework for constructing this research, this study sought to uncover gender commonalities and differences in the gendered media engaging processes of selectings, interpretings, utilizings, and the conditions in which either manifests. A series of interviews, using Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology, were conducted with men and women to explore their experiences with these gendered media. By combining Sense-Making Methodology's Lifeline and Microelement interviewing protocols, men and women recalled four types of experiences with gendered media: media meant for men versus media meant for women; and media used only once versus media used repeatedly. Analysis focused on their selectings, interpretings, and utilizings of these media products, both within specific sense-making instances and across these instances and the four recalled situations. Overall, the results of the convergings and divergings across the qualitative and quantitative analyses demonstrate a mixture of meeting stereotypical expectations and of resulting from interactions between personal preferences and situational characteristics. For either, how gender is seen and activated as an interpretive stance appears to mediate or moderate which factor is more related to the gendered media engaging during specific aspects of the process.
Brenda Dervin (Advisor)
Jared Gardner (Committee Member)
Daniel McDonald (Committee Member)
Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick (Committee Member)
306 p.
Communication; Mass Media
sense-making; Sense-Making Methodology; gender; media engagings; agency; situationality; media use; media effects; reception studies; audience studies

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Reinhard, C. D. (2008). Gendered Media Engagings as User Agency Mediations with Sociocultural and Media Structures: A Sense-Making Methodology Study of the Situationality of Gender Divergences and Convergences. [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1404816397

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Reinhard, CarrieLynn. Gendered Media Engagings as User Agency Mediations with Sociocultural and Media Structures: A Sense-Making Methodology Study of the Situationality of Gender Divergences and Convergences. 2008. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1404816397.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Reinhard, CarrieLynn. "Gendered Media Engagings as User Agency Mediations with Sociocultural and Media Structures: A Sense-Making Methodology Study of the Situationality of Gender Divergences and Convergences." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1404816397

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1404816397
1,564
© 2008, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Gendered Media Engagings as User Agency Mediations with Sociocultural and Media Structures: A Sense-Making Methodology Study of the Situationality of Gender Divergences and Convergences. by CarrieLynn D. Reinhard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.