CMC 2019 - Research - Diversity in UK Kids’ TV

The UK component of a worldwide research project into gender and diversity in children’s television. How does UK fiction content fare? IZI (International Central Institute for Youth and Educational Television) recently published research into gender and diversity representation in children’s TV worldwide – 10 years on from their original study and now also incorporating statistics as to gender make-up of production teams. Dr Lynn Whitaker carried out the UK leg of the 2018 research, analysing a 300-hour sample of UK free-to–air children’s TV including CBeebies, CBBC, CiTV and Milkshake. As well as considering both on-screen and off-screen gender representation in both fiction and non-fiction programmes, the fiction programmes were analysed for diversity aspects through nuanced genre-, narrative- and character-focused analysis. For example, questions such as, ‘What skills or resources are used to solve problems?’ and, ‘What groups or settings do main characters operate in?’ were asked, in combination with more representational aspects of characters’ appearance (age, race, ethnicity, body type, hair colour etc.). Lynn will discuss the findings from the UK sample, contextualising them within the bigger international picture and in comparison to the 2008 study, using examples of specific fiction programmes to illustrate the main trends and to reflect on what we are doing well and what we might do better. Presented by Dr Lynn Whitaker, University of Glasgow