Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship

这项为期两年的博士后研究奖学金将使沃德博士有机会在加州大学洛杉矶分校的教育学院接受培训。她的研究生课程是社会心理学，她的研究兴趣主要集中在儿童对男女关系的总体理解，特别是性方面。在她的博士后工作中，她将研究电视上的性内容、青少年的性别角色概念以及他们的性观念和行为之间的联系。博士后研究将包括收集青少年使用电视的数据，开发评估电视内容使用和解释的新的实证指标，以及使用复杂的统计模型。她还将对传播理论有所了解，这将极大地增强她的理论基础。教育学院对研究应用的重视将为她提供所需的基础，使她能够更直接地将研究与现实世界联系起来。尽管人们经常认为青少年在电视上消费色情内容与他们的性观念和性行为有关，但对这一联系的经验支持一直很少，而且前后不一致。这项博士后研究试图为这些问题提供一个全面的研究。

This two year fellowship for postdoctoral study will allow Dr. Ward the opportunity to obtain training in the School of Education at UCLA. Her graduate work has been in social psychology and her research interests have centered on children's understanding of male-female relations in general and sexuality in particular. For her postdoctoral work she will be examining associations between sexual content on television, adolescents' gender-role concepts, and their sexual conceptions and behaviors. The postdoctoral research will include collecting data about television use among adolescents, developing new empirical measures assessing use and interpretation of television content, and working with complex statistical models. She will also obtain an understanding of communication theories which will greatly enhance her theoretical foundation. The School of Education's emphasis on research applications will give her the foundation she needs to link her research more directly to the real world. Although it has frequently been assumed that adolescents' consumption of sexual content on television relates to their conceptions of sexuality and to their sexual conduct, empirical support for this link has been sparse and inconsistent. This postdoctoral research is an attempt to provide a comprehensive study of these issues.