Cummings, Kelsey. 2018 “Gendered Choices: Examining the Mechanics of Mobile and Online Girl Games.” Television & New Media 19 (1): 24-41. doi: 10.1177/1527476417697269.

The author Kelsey Cummings researched the subgenre of mobile online games created for girls. The research question is whether the mechanics in three games–Barbie Fashionistas, Style Studio: Fashion Designer, and Central Park Wedding Prep–serve gendered ideologies that are harmful to girl players. The data that the author chose to gather and analyze are the games itself, as well as some reviews and game play footages available on social media. In looking at Barbie Fashionistas, Cummings criticize the game play as it revolves around the aesthetics of Barbie’s bodies; the core mechanic of dressing her is reliant on her thinness and unattainable body image. The author calls the Style Studio game mechanics as “playing against design” because it differentiates itself from the Barbie Fashionistas. It includes male models and it does not encourage girls to dream and imagine themselves as the avatar like with Barbie. However, the game still showcases thin female models and muscular and masculinized male models. Although the female models display a more attainable body image, they still reinforce the strict cisnormative gender binary. The last game Cummings looked at is Central Park Wedding Prep, which is different from the other two games because the player needs to wash, cleanse, and pluck the avatar’s face before applying makeup, select hair and eye colors, and finally dress the avatar in preparation for their paid-for wedding in Central Park. In the reviews, this game is criticized because it perpetuates the notions of the New York Fashion Scene that are present in pop culture, but not the real culture. It is marketed towards what young girls want to believe, and not the reality. This game perpetuates class-based ideology as the bride and groom dream for a Central Park Wedding, and did everything to attain it. Even having their wedding photo album done in Central Park, even though they could not have a Central Park wedding. Girl players are taught to follow a Cinderella narrative that they can project themselves onto. In conclusion, Cummings deduced that no matter the attempts at breaking away from the patriarchy, the marketing of these “Girl Games” are still terribly designed and still perpetuating particular ideologies and worldviews that are potentially harmful to young girls who play them.

Tomkinson, Sian, and Tauel Harper. 2015 “The Position of Women in Video Game Culture: Perez and Day’s Twitter Incident.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 29 (4): 617-634. doi: 10.1080/10304312.2015.1025362.

As video game culture becomes more mainstream and attracts a larger player base both male and female, the tensions between the genders increased, manifested by misogynistic acts against females. Video games are normatively framed as a hypermasculine space by the men who dominates it. These men call women to “degender” themselves to achieve equal opportunity, and those who don’t are labelled “fake” and harassed. This article is a historical research revolving one incident particularly where the female video game celebrity Felicia Day was attacked online by video games journalist Ryan Perez and other online posters. The authors’ research question asks whether this ‘Twitter Incident” and the events following it were acts of catharsis or a watershed that signals that females in gaming culture and industries could experience an evolution in gender relationships. The type of data the researchers gathered were reports of events that they gathered from various articles. These reports paint the story of how the gaming space were gendered, how games marketed to females failed, and how men reacted when females joined their space and played games marketed for male. They also did research on Felicia Day’s history as she became an iconic actress and content creator in the gaming industry, a representative of females in game culture, and all the events leading up to the “Twitter Incident.” The also did research in all the events that happened following the incidents, how Destructoid, the gaming journal and Ryan Perez’s employer, apologized to Day, how people came to her defense and call out the misogyny in the industry. The analysis was qualitative and the authors showed in their analysis that the incident was a watershed for gender relationships that promotes a crackdown on misogynistic tendencies and a change of attitude when Perez was condemned by the community, and it was also an act of catharsis, where the community feels their guilt about the misogyny were cleansed. This article paints a clear and detailed picture of the history of misogyny in video games culture and how the community have started to move forward with a more open attitude towards women who play games.

Campbell, Howard. 2014 “Narco-Propaganda in the Mexican ‘Drug War.’” Latin American Perspective 41 (195): 60-77. doi: 10.1177/0094582X12443519.

Violence and organized crimes produced by narcotic selling cartels have ravaged Mexico for 20 years. The drug business in Mexico boomed after filling in for the power vacuum left behind after the U.S. shut down the Colombian organizations. In 2006, President Felipe Calderon’s aggressive new policy to shutdown the largest Mexican cartels exacerbated the tension, causing 50,000 deaths and thousands still missing. Howard Campbell conducted an anthropological study on the current cartels and how they are embedded in Mexican culture to find a better solution in the future. His research question asked how the various forms of narco-propaganda in Mexico form their own kind of criminal and quasi-political and how we should treat them.

In collecting the propaganda and its effects, Campbell had to collect reports of acts and behaviors. The reports of these events come in the form of journalism articles and books on Mexican drug cartels. He coded the propaganda into 4-types: public spectacles of violence, written narco messages, videos and internet posts, music and lyrics, and control/censorship of the media. He analyzed each of the examples of propaganda qualitatively, explaining how they are more political statements than just criminal acts. They carried out acts of violence to terrify people, force passive coercion and ensure a certain desired reaction from the government. Their violence is “excessive but stylized” and not meaningless criminal acts. They made banners, posters, and manifestos, glorifying their organizations while criticizing and defacing rivals and the government. They used these written messages to declare that everything evil is done by a certain other rival cartel while they would never commit heinous act, or they justified their violence because they believed those whom they killed deserved it. They also used propaganda like music to recruit and enforce loyalty like any state actor. They also paid off the media to tell their version of the story and killed a large amount of journalists who tried to expose them in the past.

Howard Campbell concluded that by analyzing Narco-propaganda with an anthropology study, he saw that the cartel used it as a strategy to capture territory, control police force, and the Mexican people. He believed that the political statements they are making with the propaganda is extremely dangerous “unorthodox politics.” In order to deal with them, he suggested controlling the information they put out, rather than a kinetic war like President Felipe Calderon attempted in 2006 which backfired.

Waasdorp, Tracy Evian, and Catherine P. Bradshaw. 2011 “Examining Student Responses to Frequent Bullying: A Latent Class Approach” Journal of Educational Psychology 103 (2): 336-352. doi: 10.1037/a0022747.

Research on bullying is necessary to answer questions about how to prevent and deal with this major issue that is happening to our children. Because I did my first journal exercise on this same topic, I was able to find another interesting and relevant article from browsing the table of contents of the same Journal of Education Psychology issue for this exercise. The previous one I talked about deals with how parents respond to their children’s victimization. This one deals with the students’ response instead. This study is from two out three of the authors of the last article. Both of these articles were found in the Armacost Library Bound Periodicals section (LB 1051 .A2 J6).

Here the authors set out to find a pattern in the ways children respond to victimization.This study has three research questions in the form of three hypothesis. The primary one asked whether or not “discrete patterns” of responses would emerge. The patterns they were looking for were seeking of social support, aggressive, and passive response. From the previously published literature on this topic, they expect to see a difference in responses by gender and school level. The second research question inquired if the way children respond are affected by forms or frequency of bullying and if the victims were also bullies. The third question asked if the aggressive or passive was more dangerous.

To collect the reports of acts and behavior, the data gathering method that the author chose was to use an anonymous online survey in a Maryland public school district. Although many students completed the survey, the author wound up with a subsample of 4,312 bullied students after excluding those who were not victimized. The students answered questions about their demographic information, about how they responded to being bullied, about whether they externalized or internalized their problems, how they were bullied and how often they were bullied, and whether they have bullied others. The authors analyzed the data using both descriptive analysis and the Latent Class Approach with the Mplus 5.21 statistical program.

The result of their research found four patterns of responses, as opposed to the hypothesized three. Most students ignore the bully. The smaller group of aggressive responders differed in each gender groups–boys preferred to be more physically aggressive whereas girls were more verbal. The last two types of options were actively problem-solving by telling the bully to stop and support seeking from authority figures or friends; however, there was no pattern of one group that primarily chose this approach. There was another small group, called the undifferentiated/high class that endorsed most or all of the possible responses. This group showed the most internalizing and externalizing symptoms. The author theorized that ignoring/walking away is the more effective strategy for diffusing bullying and lessening social-emotional problems.

However, the limits this study had was that the authors could not confirm the causal relationship between some response strategies and social-emotional problems. They suggest longitudinal data for future research that wants to explore that relationship. Aside from the limit, this research reports clear findings on how different groups of students respond to bullying and how we can help them.

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“The Link Between Parents’ Perceptions of the School and their Responses to School Bullying: Variation by Child Characteristics and the Forms of Victimization” by Tracy Evian Waasdorp, Catherine P. Bradshaw, and Jeffrey Duong.

Bullying and its effects on children’s behavior, mental health, academic performance, and the climate of school need to be prevented and intervened on time. It is important that families work with schools to better support the bullied students. In this study, the authors researched the relationship between parents’ perception of the school climate and their response to their child’s victimization. The authors’ research question tested the accuracy of the hypothesis, “The more positively parents perceived the school’s climate, the more likely a parent would be to contact the school when their child is victimized.” The authors also examined other demographic factors that might affect both their perception of the school and their response, such as gender, race, grade level. The results of their research stated that the hypothesis was incorrect and the reality was the inverse.

To answer their research question, the authors needed to gather data about how parents responded to their child’s victimization as well as their perception of the school. These are reports of behavior and shallow opinions, therefore the authors utilized surveys. They asked a sample of 773 parents questions about their demographic information, their responses to bullying, how they view the schools, and the form of their child’s victimization. This sample had the odds ratio of 1.12 and 95% confidence level. After the parents reported their demographic info, the first question was, “What did you do when your child told you about being bullied?” There were six possible answers of the different methods the parents chose to deal with their child’s victimization. The next question asked the parents to assess the school, giving them 9 options to check. Each option gave either a 0 or 1 rating, in which 9 options added up together to give the school a score–the higher the score represented a more positive view of the school’s climate. The last question gave parents options to check all the forms of bullying their child had experienced. The authors then analyzed these data with the Mplus 6.1 statistical software.

The result showed that their hypothesis was wrong. The more favorable parents viewed the school’s climate, the less likely they were to respond to their children’s victimization. However, there was a negative correlation between the level of victimization that child feels with the parental perception. Because of this, the authors extrapolated that the more their children were bullied, the less the parents trusted the school to handle their children’s safety and had to take matters into their own hand; whereas when they view the climate to be good because their children were not bullied as badly, they trust the school to sufficiently help their kids. Even though the result did not turn out as expected, it brought clarity to the question of when parents decide to be involved in their child victimization. It also opened up further questions about this topic. To expand on this research project in the future, one could conduct in-depth interviews with the parents to hear them explain why they have certain views of the school and why they react a certain way to bullying. Though this study was not perfect, the author fully explained all the limitations and why certain data did not work, (not enough data on minorities, the web survey being unable to reach certain demographics, etc.) This article would be a great place to start if one were interested in this topic because the data were well-collected and well-analyzed and the limitations were clearly explained with great tips on how to improve them.

Waasdorp, Tracy Evian, Catherine P. Bradshaw, Jeffrey Duong. 2011 “The Link Between Parents’ Perceptions of the School and their Responses to School Bullying: Variation by Child Characteristics and the Forms of Victimization.” Journal of Educational Psychology 103 (2): 324-335. doi: 10.1037/a0022748.