CHILD CHARACTERS IN TELEVISION ADVERTISING AND GENDER STEREOTYPES

The aim of this study is to examine the child characters in television advertisements in terms of gender behavior patterns. For this purpose, we tried to determine what kinds of behavior patterns are depicted according to the genders of child characters. Television advertisements that are analyzed in the research have been gathered by using the keyword "children and advertising" via the youtube.com website. Ads reached after the query have been filtered by the number of views and reached the most viewed ads. In this frame, the top 100 television commercials to be analyzed in the survey were subjected to the preliminary process within the framework of the criteria set. Finally, 76 television ad spots were included in the search by eliminating repetitive ads. The data were collected from TV advertisements by using content analysis technique and coded and analyzed in SPSS 15.0 program. Firstly, frequency and percentages are determined and interpreted, then relations between variables are expressed by cross table and Kendall-Spearman correlation tests. In addition, we used one-way analysis of variance test to understand whether the variables varied with each other. Gender stereotypes exhibited by children characters in television commercials become divergent according to product category, outsourced sex, mobility, utility type. The male characters in the advertisements were stronger and more directive, while the female characters were reflected along with their compliance and submission behaviors. Also, as age progresses, the rate of girls depicted in television commercials decreases