The occupational, and marital status representations of the female characters in ‘Il-Klikka’

Abstract

The following account is a study about the representation of the female characters in the locally produced series “Il-Klikka”. The Literature studied focuses on the areas of representation with particular emphasis on gender, highlighting relevant observations that are linked to female occupation, the role of the housewife and marital status as produced and created on screen. This study is based on various works, such as those by the author Signorielli. Statistics issued by the National Statistics Office regarding the current Maltese occupational trends can also be found within the text. A Content Analysis was used to gather the data supporting this study. It was vital to use a content analysis because it allowed the researcher to define particular coding units, which, for the purpose of this study, were representations of the housewife and representations of occupational status which was divided into occupational high income and occupational low income. Characters which fit within these categories were studied further in order to discover their marital status.The coding units allowed the researcher to delve deeper into the mind of the producers and to better understand and gauge the meaning of particular representations by viewing and observing the series as a text. Each appearance was recorded, tagged and grouped under a number of coding units referred to as “instances of representation”. Findings of results, based on the number of instances, are quantitative which allowed the research to be done in an unbiased way. The findings of this study show that although the first season of the series “Il Klikka” is successful in linking representation with the Maltese culture, there are still areas with room for improvement that can be focused on. It is important to add that the content analysis used in this study simply applies to the first season of the series and that the findings of this study cannot be generalized to any other series or season of “Il-Klikka.”