Soap Opera whole episode analysis (Coronation Street)

I decided to watch a full episode of a popular soap and analyse what I saw during the episode.

I firstly researched the three most popular soaps through using the internet the results I obtained were, Eastenders, Coronation Street and Emmerdale.
The Soap I chose to anaylse were Coronation Street I watched an episode of each and analysed what I saw into certian catergories.

Number of characters

Type of Characters

Settings

Number of Scenes

Storylines

By looking at these different groups I looked at my results and ordered them into different catrergories including age, gender and ethnicity.

Corronation Street Monday 20th June 8:30pm

Here is the link to the episode -
Run, Adam, run!

There is not alot in this clip that shows any inequalitys between age, in the start of the clip the older woman (the mum) is making the dinner for her son and his wife this shows the stereotypical role of the mother, this also links to gender in how it was the woman cooking the dinner.

The locations that are used in this epsiode are stereotypical of a small town with such things as a cafe, pub and taxi service this helps to create verisimililartude towards to audience of the soap makes them feel more at home when watching.

There is use of stereotyping through the jobs shown in this episode with the men driving the Taxi's. At the staet of the clip sterotyping is used once again when there is a clip of the woman cleaning and the man not. Another job stereotyping is that the police officer in this clip is of the male gender and a police officer is seen as a more powerful job this signifies male power. When there is a man and a woman who clearly have a problem with someone it is the man who does the talking this signifies male dominance.

I wrote down the number of scenes that were in this clip

There were 6 scenes, I then split these scenes into whether the scene showed male dominance or female dominance.

There were 4 scenes signifying male dominance

There were 2 scenes signifying Felmale dominance

This shows that throughout the clip without meaning too the soap signifies that the male is the more dominant gender through such things as the jobs they have and what is said by different genders.

For example

2 men are having a conversation and the man says 'If you want to make it work give it a chance, if you dont then dont' this signifies that the man has the power in the relationship over the woman and it is his decision whether it works or not.

This male dominance from this male character continues at the end of the clip when the male says to the woman that he wants a divorce he holds to the power over her as she begs for him not to leave her.


However there is a scene in this clip that signifies the female dominance over male, there is a man and woman in a pub and the woman is holding the power over the man as he is apologizing to her.

As a whole there is a mixture of male and female dominance and the same with age throughout the soap of corrination street just depending on the different storylines but throught there are 2 or more storylines that are different and appeal to opposite genders.

As for location it is aimed towards lower dempographic groups to try and create verisimilartude towards the audience through the use of the cafe, pub, mechanics and other stereotypical lower demogrphic jobs.