Biomaterial Database

Race and gender in current American politics: a discourse-analytic perspective. 2008

Camelia Suleiman, and Daniel C O'Connell

Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA. cameliasuleiman@yahoo.com

Male and female, black and white political interviewees (M. Albright, B. Clinton, H. Clinton, B. Obama, C. Powell, and C. Rice) of Larry King on CNN TV are used to ascertain whether ethnicity and gender affect the way politicians actually speak. Qualitative comparisons are made of Obama's hesitations and rate with and without a threatening context. A number of normalized response measures are evaluated quantitatively: percentage of syllables spoken by each interviewee, and use of interjections, interruptions, self-referent I, non-standard English, y' know, and syllables of laughter. Senator Obama and Secretary of State Rice become the focus of the comparative evidence that both ethnicity and gender do indeed influence the speaking of politicians.

UI	MeSH Term	Description	Entries
D007407	Interviews as Topic	Works about conversations with an individual or individuals held in order to obtain information about their background and other personal biographical data, their attitudes and opinions, etc. It includes works about school admission or job interviews.	Group Interviews,Interviewers,Interviews, Telephone,Oral History as Topic,Group Interview,Interview, Group,Interview, Telephone,Interviewer,Interviews, Group,Telephone Interview,Telephone Interviews
D007845	Laughter	An involuntary expression of merriment and pleasure; it includes the patterned motor responses as well as the inarticulate vocalization.
D008297	Male		Males
D008913	Minority Groups	A subgroup having special characteristics within a larger group, often bound together by special ties which distinguish it from the larger group.	Group, Minority,Groups, Minority,Minority Group
D011057	Politics	Activities concerned with governmental policies, functions, etc.	Political Activity,Conservatism,Decentralization,Liberalism,Political Factors,Activities, Political,Activity, Political,Factor, Political,Factors, Political,Political Activities,Political Factor
D011578	Psycholinguistics	A discipline concerned with relations between messages and the characteristics of individuals who select and interpret them; it deals directly with the processes of encoding (phonetics) and decoding (psychoacoustics) as they relate states of messages to states of communicators.	Psycholinguistic
D001741	Black or African American	A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/1997/10/30/97-28653/revisions-to-the-standards-for-the classification-of-federal-data-on-race-and-ethnicity). In the United States it is used for classification of federal government data on race and ethnicity. Race and ethnicity terms are self-identified social construct and may include terms outdated and offensive in MeSH to assist users who are interested in retrieving comprehensive search results for studies such as in longitudinal studies.	African American,African Americans,African-American,Afro-American,Afro-Americans,Black Americans,Blacks,Negroes,African-Americans,Negro,Afro American,Afro Americans,American, African,American, Black,Black American
D005260	Female		Females
D006801	Humans	Members of the species Homo sapiens.	Homo sapiens,Man (Taxonomy),Human,Man, Modern,Modern Man
D012737	Sex Factors	Maleness or femaleness as a constituent element or influence contributing to the production of a result. It may be applicable to the cause or effect of a circumstance. It is used with human or animal concepts but should be differentiated from SEX CHARACTERISTICS, anatomical or physiological manifestations of sex, and from SEX DISTRIBUTION, the number of males and females in given circumstances.	Factor, Sex,Factors, Sex,Sex Factor