Examine four advertisements of your choice for various aspects that are interesting from a social science perspective.
The work you do on this comparison template will directly support your work on two other longer-term projects an observation journal and a presentation which are due later in the course.
This comparison template assignment will assess the following course outcome, which you focused on throughout the first two modules:
Utilize fundamental approaches to social scientific research in addressing questions related to human behaviors
Prompt
To start this assignment, you will gather a set of four advertisements from the provided Advertisement Examples document that features multiple people.
You will then use these advertisements to fill in the provided Comparison Template document, in which you address specific social science aspects of each advertisement in preparation for your next project, the observation journal.
Specifically, the following critical elements must be addressed and will be graded using the rubric at the end of this document:
I. Question how individuals are represented in the ads. In your template, ask questions about the individuals in the ads that social scientists might ask.
For instance, you might ask why a person in the ad is standing outside the larger group, or why individuals are depicted in certain ways.
II. Question how groups and group behavior are represented in the advertisements. In your template, ask questions about groups/group interactions that social scientists might ask. For instance, you might ask why the women are grouped together separately from the men, or why the group seems to have very little diversity.
III. Question how different cultures and cultural identity are represented in the advertisements. In your template, ask questions about the cultures and cultural identities in the ads that social scientists might ask. For instance, you might ask why people who look to be of the same ethnic background are wearing similar clothing, or what certain symbols or interactions may mean related to culture.
IV. Notate how the advertisements compare and contrast to each other. For instance, do you see any commonalities or significant differences among interactions between the ads? What might these commonalities or differences say about human interactions?
V. Pose questions a social scientist might be interested in, based on your observations of the advertisements. For instance, what larger questions about human interactions might they ask?
For this, you may build on your comparisons, concentrate on a theme or trend you noticed throughout the ads, or develop a follow-up question related to a particularly interesting ad.
