Final Project Blog

Virginia Lopez
Content Analysis of Movie Previews

I found that the content of the previews in some movies were not as explicit as I thought. I thought that the previews were going to have mass amounts of sexual and violent content but from my study, I realized that wasn’t necessarily true.

My content analysis method is based on the research done by Mary Beth Oliver and Sriram Kalyanaraman. They examined the violent and sexual portrayals in movie previews on movie rentals. The codes I used are similar to the ones used in their study. However, I don’t think I went into that much detail. They analyzed more than 40 movie previews and I only looked at previews from six movies. Oliver and Kalyanaraman find that sex and violence in movie previews is high. They looked at the ratings of the movies and analyzed the previews and tried to find a correlation based on the rating of the movie in which those previews are showed in.

I used six movies for my content analysis. I used King Arthur, The Illusionist, Nacho Libre, Stomp the Yard, Silent Hill and Notes on a Scandal. Most of the movies that I used for this study are rated PG 13, one is rated PG and the rest are rated R. I found that the preview that showed the most sexual and violent content in general was a preview of Mission Impossible in the movie Nacho Libre. Nacho Libre is the only PG movie that I used in this study.

I thought it was going to be a dramatic number of the content of these previews but in reality, it wasn’t. I was pleasantly surprised at what I found although I think that the only reason this happened is because I used movies from my apartment. They were randomly chosen from the sample in my personal Blockbuster and I really don’t own that many R rated movies and therefore I think this study will work better with a more organized sample. I think that if the sample pool was bigger and movies from different rating groups were included a better depiction of the true amount of content will possibly prove the point that I was trying to make.