To Caffeinate, Divine

The preliminary research question for the group portion of the Amsterdam project is: "How do stores, advertising, and couture reflect Dutch/Amsterdam culture both in intended and unintended ways?" My prong of this research would be advertising, with a focus on how advertising reflects the culture in regards to women.

To do this, I plan to take a two-part approach to the project. Part one would be analysis of advertisements in Amsterdam to see how women are portrayed. It would be an outsider's view of how women are regarded overall in Dutch culture, and would also give me a chance to research the history of women's rights in the the Netherlands. Part two would be how Dutch women themselves feel about how accurately advertising represents the culture and their own role in it. This would be done through interviews with women in Amsterdam in which they would rate various advertising campaigns for "accuracy" under a variety of factors (culture as a whole, how women are regarded, etc. This is just a very basic idea at this point).

Potential ethical issues are that I would perhaps accidentally guide the women's responses through the advertisements I choose to present them; I may not get an accurate cross-section of Dutch society with my survey; and looking at advertisements is fully a subjective exercise, and open to my own preconceived notions about the culture, which could be degrading to the culture as a whole (i.e. I might be more likely to represent Dutch culture as "backwards" now that I know that women didn't get the right to hold their jobs after marriage until 1954). I am not sure how I could best objectively choose advertisements to present for the survey. However, I would like to try to be as representative of the Dutch demographics as possible (trying to look at different classes and races, which would also perhaps be factored into my project as a whole- if different races of women are represented in advertisements). My awareness that I do have preconcieved notions should help me deal with them, and I think the surveys will balance out and represent opinions beyond my own.