The Morality of Television Genres: Norm Violations and Their Narrative Context in Four Popular Genres of Serial Fiction

ABSTRACT

In a quantitative content analysis, social norm violations and their narrative context are analyzed in 225 episodes of 15 television series of four popular television genres (crime drama, medical drama, sitcom, and daily soap). Extending previous studies, the authors’ results indicate that aggressive norm violations are only a fraction of all norm violations, which are dominated by lying/deception, swearing/use of vulgar language, and verbal attacks. The narrative context shows that norm violations are often motivated by egoism, receive low punishment, are rarely forgiven and seldom reflected by the characters; this, however, depends on the type of norm violation. Genre differences were observed and their potential for effects on audiences’ moral thinking is discussed.

Funding

This research was funded by a grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG) to H. Bilandzic (Grant no. BI 939/8-1).

Supplemental Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

^1. An electronic copy of the codebook is available from the first author upon request.

^2. No season information was available for daily soaps, so 15 consecutive episodes (representing 3 weeks, from Monday to Friday) were randomly selected for coding.

^3. The pretest coding of the 15 episodes was not used for the final data set; instead the 15 episodes were coded again after the pretest.

^4. For the detailed figures on genre differences, please see supplemental documents on the publisher’s website.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by a grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG) to H. Bilandzic (Grant no. BI 939/8-1).