Makthavare på tv: vältaliga män och välklädda kvinnor : En kvalitativ publikstudie om hur partiledare, ur ett genusperspektiv, uppmärksammas i valdebatter

Sammanfattning: This study aims from a gender perspective to examine how the audience pay attention to people of power in news media. To examine this we viewed how televiewers pay attention to party leaders in televised political debates. The studys gender perspective can be divided into two main aspects, on one hand whether the party leaders gender have any impact on the televiewers attention and on the other hand whether the televiewers gender have any impact on how they divide their attention. The questions examined are “how do televiewers pay attention to male versus female party leaders in political televised debates?” and “what differences and similarities can be found in how male versus female televiewers pay attention to party leaders in political televised debates?”. To get a comprehensive understanding of the audiences attention we combined two different methods; eye tracking methodology and qualitative interview. Eye tracking generated objective knowledge of the televiewers visual fixations while the qualitative interview gave us a deeper understanding of their memorialization. Five men and five women participated in this study.  Our results show that our participants give more detailed attention to the female party leaders appearances, while to a greater extent remembering the male party leaders political statements. We found more similarities than differences in how male versus female televiewers pay attention to party leaders, both with and without regard of the party leaders gender. For example male politicians seem to be the norm for what makes a party leader, since many participants primarily tend to fixate on them while also remembering their statements. However, our male participants tend to make fewer but longer fixations while our female participants instead tend to make more but shorter fixations. To summarize the results, we can see that both the party leaders and the televiewers gender have an significance to the televiewers attention.