Week 1: Methodology Creation
Krish S -
Getting to the methodology of my research, my original plan was to collect reviews for a male-nominated director and reviews for a female-nominated director during a given year. However, I realized that over the past 15 years, there were only 6 years where female directors were nominated for the “best director” Oscar award. This is because the “best director” nomination award does not separate divisions for men and women. Thus, I decided to switch my focus to actors instead of directors. The best “actor” nomination award does separate divisions for men and women, as 5 male actors and 5 female actors are nominated for the award each year. This is much better for my research, as now I am able to actually conduct the first part of my methodology, which I will explain in the next paragraph. Looking at actors over directors is more effective in evaluating gender bias for two reasons: 1) the fact that way more male directors are nominated over female directors already shows gender disparities which defeats the purpose of my research and 2) the genre of the film is not a confounding variable because critiques based on the performance of the actor or actress are not that dependent upon the content of the film. I just wanted to let you know my thought process of why I chose to evaluate actors specifically.
In the next few weeks, I will be collecting reviews for my research prior to doing the sentiment analysis. I need a total of 6 reviews per year, and thus 90 total reviews from 2010-2024. Here’s the breakdown for a given year: 1 review for male/NYT, 1 review for male/Guardian, 1 review for male/Wall Street, 1 review for female/NYT, 1 review for female/Guardian, and 1 review for female/Wall Street. As you can see, I used only news outlets to represent these reviews. Because different news outlets have different ways they might convey information, I used 3 news outlets that cover the entire political spectrum to eliminate any confounding variables. Note: these news outlets are subject to change upon further research.
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