Psychology Extended Essay- media influences OR gender stereotyping

[sofiegah]

Hi everyone!

I'm currently doing my IB in Dubai and doing my extended essay in psychology. I had a topic and a question, but I really want to change it as I don't think there is enough research for it, and I know i'm pretty late chosing another topic.

I am interested in doing it either on media influences or on gender stereotyping, for example: "To what extent does gender affect our identity?"

Please help! Would this question be too broad and not focused? If you have any other ideas please tell me!

Thank you!

[blindpet]

Hello fellow Dane. That is definitely too broad. If you are interested in gender stereotyping you can look at how hormones affect gender identity based on hormonal disorders like Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (Hines et al 2003) and Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (Meyer-Bahlberg et al 2006).

Media influences will be very broad and hard to find any concrete research on, very interesting idea though .

[Renene]

Well in a sense, gender highly affects our identity, partially because that's what gender is. Whether you are male, female, genderqueer, etc., your identity is based around that. Our society aligns gender identity with the sex you were born with, and depending on what your gender is, you are automatically given certain expectations on who you have to be as a person. There are definitely a lot of articles you can find in terms of media and gender roles, here's some that I have found, I hope these help

http://www.udel.edu/comm245/readings/GenderedMedia.pdf

http://www.seejane.org/

I personally also reccomend to look into art pieces; contemporary pieces have done a lot of tackling on the subject of gender roles and identity

[blindpet]

Good find Renene. If you do choose to use that article bear in mind it includes many references that are not appropriate for EEs (like newspaper articles and other sources) so go through and cherry pick the ones that are actually from research journals or books written by scientists (NOT journalists). I still think it will be way too broad and you will want to get specific so you can really focus on a simple, rather than a broad, question you could write a book about.

If you use the seejane resource stick to the research tab and try and find the source articles her friends have summarized.

While art pieces tell a lot about society's perception I would not recommend basing your EE on them, you could use them as an example but they are unlikely to be considered evidence in the eyes of psychologists.

To summarize, you can pick any topic you want but makes sure your sources are articles written by researchers, compare, contrast and evaluate the research to try and answer your question.