M ETHODOLOGICAL CHALLENGES AND LIMITATIONS

One of the challenges of my study, which affects two aspects of the categorization process, is subjectivity. Firstly, there are no set rules for what can and cannot constitute a compliment or insult. Thus, classifying whether various utterances are evaluations or not is entirely reliant on the researcher and is, therefore, subject to the researcher’s judgment. However, since the discourse analyzed occurs in DTVS, visual cues and social context were used to interpret the speech acts more accurately. This made it easier to discover, for example, insults that might, on a surface level, look like positive evaluations, such as backhanded, sarcastic, and insincere compliments. For example, at first glance, the utterance “thanks for having my back” (R-08) seems to be a compliment to Jughead (the addressee) in regard to Relationship building.

However, with the help of audio-visual cues and social context, it becomes clear that the compliment is sarcastic, and therefore, really an insult. In addition to consulting the series for context, I also conferred with my supervisor and a peer about evaluations I was unsure about, which helped reduce the subjectivity to some degree.

Secondly, again, since there is no universal agreement for what constitutes compliments and insults, there is no set system of categorization. Hence, the choice of categories and the categorization of the compliments and insults itself would be heavily influenced by the interpretation of the researcher. For example, a few compliments and insults were ambiguous, in that they could be referring to different aspects of a person’s character. For example, the compliment “What kind of foolish woman would let you go?” (13RW-03) could both be a compliment of the target’s Physical traits and of their General traits. In the case of such ambiguous evaluations, I conferred with my supervisor and a peer and decided that it was more

appropriate to categorize them into both of the two possible categories rather than to apply my own interpretation of which one category would be the most suitable.

However, in the cases where the evaluations required too much interpretation, they had to be excluded. For instance, the insult “yeah, somehow I don't see Bryce walking into a sex shop” (13RW-02) is clearly an evaluation of Bryce. Yet, neither the social context nor the audio-visual cues provided by the series helped determine what aspect of Bryce’s character is under scrutiny. Similarly, the utterance “I love a good closet case” (R-01) had to be excluded because of the amount of interpretation involved. On the one hand, it could be understood as a statement of what the speaker generally likes, and thereby not an evaluation at all. On the other hand, it could be interpreted as a sarcastic compliment, and thereby an insult, of the target being a closeted gay person. The utterances that are so vague they required an unreasonable amount of interpretation, either to determine whether they are evaluations at all or to determine how they should be categorized, were excluded. Even though there were very few cases of such vague utterances, the decision to exclude any potential evaluations was done in consultation with my supervisor.

Another group of compliments and insults that had to be excluded from my study was non-evaluative utterances. These utterances, though they are all compliments or insults, such as “good to have you back” (13RW-01) and “I wish you were dead” (13RW-06), they do not provide evaluations of any specific aspect of the target’s character. The most common non-evaluative insult from the data material is “fuck you”, which was also excluded. However, in the cases where the speaker specifies the insult, for example when Alex says, “fuck Justin for coming back for Jessica” (13RW-06), the utterance is not non-evaluative and is, therefore, categorized according to the specification made in the utterance, in this case: insult of Behavior.

The last group of evaluations I decided to exclude from my study was evaluations occurring in the very few dream sequences in the series. The reason for the exclusion of such evaluations is that they cannot be said to represent another character’s evaluations. For example, one of the dream sequences in 13RW occurs in the school hallway after Courtney has announced that she is gay. During this scene, several peers are seen and heard calling her slurs such as lesbo and dyke (13RW-03). Because these evaluations occur in Courtney’s mind, they are not anyone else’s evaluations, but rather her own insecurities that manifest themselves in this way.

As very few evaluations occur in dream sequences, excluding them does not affect my study in any significant way.

Another limitation of my study, caused both by the qualitative approach used and the limited scope of the study, is that I cannot make any sweeping generalizations from my results.

As mentioned in section 3.2, the aim of qualitative studies is not to give a general overview of the topic studied, but to give deeper insight into it. This is the case for my study as well, as the data material is only collected from 20 episodes from two television series. However, the aim of my study is not to make any generalizations about evaluative behavior in American DTVS, overall, but rather to give new insight into an area that has not previously been researched. I, therefore, make no claims in my study of how evaluative moves, in general, reflect gender stereotypes in American television series.

Additionally, a challenge that studying fictional discourse poses, is that the speech analyzed is not authentic (see section 2.3). This means that the results of my analysis cannot say anything about how teenage boys and girls actually talk. However, as Rey (2001) states,

“while the language used in television is obviously not the same as unscripted language, it does represent the language scriptwriters imagine that real women and men produce” (138). Fictional discourse can therefore be an interesting basis for researching language attitudes, ideologies, and stereotypes.

One of the limitations that fictional discourse might cause when researching scriptwriters’ perception of how women and men speak, is the possible discrepancy between the gender and age of the scriptwriters and the gender and age of the characters analyzed. In the case of my study, the characters analyzed are boys and girls mostly between the ages of 15 and 18, while the scriptwriters are mostly adult men. Eight out of the 20 episodes included in this study were co-written by a female scriptwriter while all 20 episodes had one or several male scriptwriters. In other words, how the female scriptwriters perceive teenage boys and girls to talk was included in the scripts of just 40% of the analyzed episodes. This means that the results of my study might, to some degree, show how adult men think teenagers speak, not how they are generally thought to speak. However, because of the male dominance within media production, and thereby scriptwriting, this issue is almost impossible to avoid.