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.
