DEVELOPING MEDIA LITERACY SKILLS TO CHALLENGE TELEVISION'S PORTRAYAL OF OLDER WOMEN

To be old in our society is to be devalued. To be old and female is to experience double oppression. This article reports on a study that examined how television both reinforces and resists the prevailing images of older women in Western society. Two randomly selected television rerun episodes of The Golden Girls were selected to use as a trigger event with members of a graduate course in Social Work with older adults at a major southeastern university. The study found that television reflects societal discourse about aging by providing unchallenged images of older women and their lives. Given the power of television, educators and gerontologists must teach students to develop critical thinking and media literacy skills that challenge and deconstruct television's images about older women and to advocate for new programming that reflects more accurate and diverse portrayals of older women.     

Statistical methods for analysing discrete and categorical data recorded in performance analysis

In this paper, we identify appropriate statistical methods for analysing categorical differences in discrete variables or 'performance indicators' resulting from performance analysis. The random mechanisms associated with discrete events do not follow a normal distribution; that is, the normal distribution is a continuous not a discrete probability distribution. We propose appropriate statistical methods based on two key discrete probability distributions, the Poisson and binomial distributions. Two approaches are proposed and compared using examples from notational analysis. The first approach is based on the classic chi-square test of significance (both the goodness-of-fit test and the test of independence). The second approach adopts a more contemporary method based on log-linear and logit models fitted using the statistical software GLIM. Provided relatively simple one-way and two-way comparisons in categorical data are required, both of these approaches result in very similar conclusions. However, as soon as more complex models or higher-order comparisons are required, the approach based on log-linear and logit models is shown to be more effective. Indeed, when investigating those factors and categorical differences associated with binomial or binary response variables, such as the proportion of winners when attempting decisive shots in squash or the proportion of goals scored from all shots in association football, logit models become the only realistic method available. By applying log-linear and logit models to discrete events resulting from notational analysis, greater insight into the underlying mechanisms associated with sport performance can be achieved.