laurenfelton

In my psych class tonight, we were ‘coding’ for sexual content in a music video. In order to do this properly, we needed to come up with specific images to look for that don’t involve any sort of subjective judgment. The idea was to tally up the amount of times a certain image appeared so that we could come up with a number representative of how much sexual content was in the video. It actually became pretty difficult to come up with a working list, because anything too general would cause disagreement when it came to deciding whether or not the content was actually sexually explicit (i.e. listing ‘passionate’ kissing - what counts as a passionate or overly sexual kiss?).

Highlight of the assignment:

Instructor: “Alright, what else can we put on the list?”
Student: “Cleavage.”
Instructor: “See, this is where it gets tricky. We’re all going to code that differently. What is considered too much cleavage? What kind of cleavage is inappropriate?”
Student: “…women’s cleavage.”
Instructor: “Right. Okay.”