Content analysis of women s letters written to a television program

Abstract

In this thesis, the contents of 1250 letters, written by womenseeking legal advice, were analyzed. The letters were mailed toa lawyer who was supervising a women's program on televisionbetween the years of 1984-1985. The aim was to evaluate someexperiential material and to get clues for further researchtopics. The lower status of women in our society was linked tofactors such as socialization, early, imposed marriages,difficulties of getting a divorce, insufficient education andlabor force participation of women. In brief, women's dependencon men and their lack of control over their lives, are thought tbe major factors underlying their problems. As information abo~their economic status was lacking, the economic developmentallevel of the area they live in was used as an independentvariable and types of the problems they experienced were expecteto vary accordingly. To test the expectations, problems weregrouped into 5 main categories; problems with the spouse, withfamilies, with children, personal welfare, and other problems.The areas, were also divided into five categories in terms oflevel of economic development; metropolitan areas, the mostdeveloped provinces, the intermediate developed provinces, theleast developed provinces and rural areas. Also in referencethe learned helplessness model of depression, the causalattributions of women who expressed depressive feelings in theirletters were compared to women who did not express any depressifeelings. Women who expressed depressive feelings in theirletters were expected to make more global and stable causalattributions for their problems than other subjects although nosignificant difference was expected to be found between thesubjects in terms of making external causal attributions. Forall the analyses chi-square test was used. The overall resultsshowed that the subjects of this study mostly suffer fromproblems related to their spouses and families. Moreover, mostof them perceived their problems as caused by external factors.Finally, the proportion of subjects expressing depressivefeelings was quite high and, as was expected, they made moreglobal and stable attributions for the cause of their problemscompared to the other subjects. The results and the implicatiof the study were further discussed.