Measuring the Female Role Portrayals in Advertising for Marketing Purpose: Taxonomy Construction and an Empirical Study in Taiwan

Researchers have concentrated on issues of female role portrayals in advertising (FRPA). The diversified research purposes and methodologies lead to the variation of definitions and manipulations in the FRPA-related literature, and hinder the integration, generalization and extension of the findings. Accordingly, this study constructs a taxonomy of FRPA and a scale to measure FRPA in a broader and more effective way. Three conceptual constructs-Power Roles, Career Roles, and Sensual Roles-were extracted as the framework for constructing the FRPA taxonomy with an exploratory study based upon Lundstrom & Sciglimpaglia's [35] Sex Roles Scale. The taxonomy is constructed through a four-phase hierarchical content analysis. Consequently, 11 measure constructs of FRPA, resulting an 11 bipolar scale, were generated to survey Taiwanese audiences' cognition toward FRPA. The empirical results show that the model has good internal consistency, reliability and validity, and audiences' cognition toward FRPA is-also revealed.