Chapter 4 Sexual Content in Soap Operas - Leicester Research ...

Sex and Sexuality: A Content Analysis of Soap Operas
scene 3], compared to 12% in Coronation Street, 6% in EastEnders, and zero
percent in each of Neighbours and Hollyoaks in the City (Table 7-4).
7.8 Summary and Discussion
A number of patterns emerged from this study‘s analysis of soap operas‘
treatment and portrayal of R & R topics. First of all, in terms of the overall amount
of R & R depiction, over one of every ten (12%) of all scenes with sexual content
included references to, or revolved around, R & R themes. Although comparisons
here are, once again, difficult to make, this particular finding compares favourably
with that of Heintz-Knowles (1996), where one out of every ten (10% or N=58 out
of total 595) of sexual behaviours across the five-week sample of ten US soap
operas was found to contain references to R & R. however, the result is perhaps less
favourable when compared with that of Greenberg and Busselle (1994), who found,
across 50 hour-long episodes of five US soaps, 18% (N=61) of the 333 indentified
sexual incidents to contain R & R references.
Comparisons with the Kaiser Family studies (Kunkel et al. 1999, 2001, 2003
and 2005) and the Irish Crisis Pregnancy Agency report (MacKeogh, 2005)—both
used more or less identical methodological measures to those employed in this
study—clearly indicate that general television programmes on US and Irish TV
networks contained much smaller percentages of scenes with R & R references than
those of soap operas (see above findings), with just 4% of all scenes (N=169 out of
3783) including R & R in the Kaiser study (2005) 58 and 5.6% (N=52 out of 925) in
MacKeogh (2005)—in fact, these two percentages still compare unfavourably to the
overall percentage in this study of scenes that primarily depicted R & R topics
(5.7% of all 506 scenes), let alone the 12% of all scenes with R & R.
Given these brief and limited comparisons, it can be generalised that soap
operas, as a TV genre, tend to include substantially more references to risks and
responsibilities and safe-sex messages than general TV output, or perhaps any other
58 Similar results were reported in the 1999 study (4% N=78 out of 1930) , and in the 2003 study
(6%, N=170 out of 2992 scenes)
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