Blog #1

Blog #1-

December 1: Context and Methodology

When starting my project, I began with a general idea. I wanted to focus on the area of psychology, but I was unsure what I wanted to do with it. Last year in AP Seminar, I did a lot of work on psychology, and specifically developmental psychology. Developmental psychology really interested me because I have personal experience with it. I remember growing up, and taking opinions from everything I interacted with. So in taking my personal experience, I found that I could create a research project.

In January of 2021, a friend and I started a Women's Empowerment and Equality club at Rock Canyon. I have been hyper aware of the feminist community, regularly focusing on gender equality. Focusing on feminism for the future causes a person to reflect on your past. This is where my previous experience that I talked about above comes in. I remember when I was younger and how I would read books and take perspectives of the world on them. I love reading books and felt this draw towards the literature world since I was young. So, I decided to combine my past experience, my feminism, and my love for books to create my project.

The process to get to my question, and my hypothesis, is listed here ->

I was led to my methodology by reading three studies:

Gender in Young Adult Literature: Harry Potter and The Hunger Game
Gender Bias and Stereotypes in Young Adult Literature: A Content Analysis of Novels For Middle School Students
Gender Bias and Stereotypes in Dystopian Young Adult Literature.

RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM GENDER BIAS

My initial guiding research question would be: Is there gender bias in young adult dystopian literature?

Sub Questions:
- How does an author's gender influence how they write young adult dystopian literature?
- How does the author's gender influence the writing of The Hunger Games and the Maze Runner?
- Based on the author's gender, what is the gender bias in The Hunger Games and the Maze Runner? (final question!)
Key Search Terms
- Young adult literature
- Dystopian literature
- Young adult dystopian literature
- Names of the books (The Hunger Games, Maze Runner, Divergent,etc.)
- Popular dystopian novels
- Gender bias
- Gender bias comparison with author gender
Hypothesis:
- The books will be biased on their different-gendered authors.The Hunger Games would be female biased, and The Maze Runner male biased.

Methodology:

The common methods of this research that I found was really just content analysis. Throughout all of the multiple papers I read they used content analysis because it was an analysis of literature and so there is really not a way to research that differently. Content analysis is where there is a set amount of terms that the researcher compares their literature to. So, for example If I am reading Harry Potter, I would read the book and where Harry is described as “daring” I would write down that description under the masculine percentage of how it differs from female descriptions. If the terms do not equal in their percentage, then there is a basis of gender. This aligns with my question because I am looking for gender bias in The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner. Not only am I just looking for the bias, I will also be comparing the difference in between different gendered authors, so I will do a comparative analysis of that as well. I will compare the percentages I find of each to find which author possesses more bias. Within my research, the terms I will be using have been used in multiple other studies. It is a set of 16 terms that holds an equal amount of feminine and masculine terms. This will provide me an unbiased basis on my terms for analysis, as well as a general starting block that has been used previously.

The terms are listed to the left.

To the right is a picture of me when I was younger :) This contributed to the WHY of my project. I want to do this project so little kids (like me) can read literature that is free from gender bias. The big picture of this project would be to push authors to write less gender bias to give all children equal opportunity in imagination, and for their life decisions.

Page updated

Report abuse