The document discusses techniques for representing social groups in radio media. It describes how radio can represent demographics like age, gender, ethnicity, and social class through elements like accents, vocabulary, grammar, sound effects, and how much time is given for speakers. Representation involves choices like which social groups and perspectives are included or left out of stories and discussions.

1. Demographic measures analyze social groups within societies.
These demographics can include:
o Age
o Gender
o Sexual Orientation
o Ethnicity
o Social Class
o Region/Location
o Culture
o Disability
In radio, there is the issue of actually representing these demographics- social class
in particular- as the audience cannot simply just see the material. Therefore, radio
shows use techniques such as sound effects, accents, etc. to portray these social
groups.
How does your media product
represent particular social groups?
How are social groups represented?

2. Social Class Representation
Techniques
In this audio extract, there are multi-syllabic words such as
“revelation” and “relative isolation” which expresses the speaker’s
educated, middle class, southern British accent. Key features of
accent are: phonemes, emphasis and articulation. Phonemes are
the basic building blocks of spoken language which do not always
correspond with the available graphemes. Phonemic variation
provides a way of identifying social class.
This representation of social class uses a group chant rather than
an individual voice. In media terms, usually the more that people
are grouped together, the lower down the social scale they are
shown to be. In this example, words from a popular song are
transformed quasi ‘football chant’. Therefore, there is a clear
contrast between the presenter’s singular voice and the grouped
chant, which shows that the group are of a lower class than the
presenter.

3. Social Class Representation
Techniques
The way in which the presenter speaks about a person can strongly
represent said person’s social class. For example, in this extract, a
man gets sentenced to jail for drug dealing. He is unable to speak
for himself, nor does he get the opportunity to do so. The fact that
the presenter describes his action as “drug dealing” suggests that
he must have a lower social class because this action would have to
be his source of income. The alliterative pattern of drug dealing
makes for easy writing of copy. Drug dealing and living on an urban
estate are associated in listeners’ minds (stereotyping).

4. Social Class Representation
Techniques
The job of a bus driver might connote misleading stereotypes
about the person’s background. Some of these stereotypes
include:
• The person comes from a working class background
• This would then lead to the idea that the person did not do
well at school, resulting in them not getting the right
qualifications to do any other job.
The person’s accent, vocabulary and grammar also reflect their
social class as the person speaks softly and does not articulate
his words, which suggests he did not come from a background
that picked up on his accent and pronunciation. Furthermore, the
fact that the bus driver has the shortest time to speak shows that
he is probably lower down the social class scale because he has
not been given a longer time to express his opinion.

5. Gender Representation
Techniques
The voice we used to introduce the name of our show was a male
voice. This person’s voice mimics an accent of someone homosexual,
which is important and reflective of the large prominent homosexual
community within Camden. Therefore this represents both gender
AND sexual orientation.
And then the voice of the presenter was a female. The use of a
female voice is important because females are stereotypically
more sympathetic than males, which we could use to say that a
female presenter is easier to listen to. Furthermore, female
voices are also stereotypically more expressive than that of
males, which helps audiences to listen to what she has to say as
her change in pitch and emphasis would highlight important
information.
In the first few seconds of the show we included two people of both genders
which shows that our show is representative of gender.

6. In the vox pop, the
snippets of audio formed a
female, male, female,
male pattern in what they
had to say about David
Bowie’s death. This
formed an equality in
importance in what the
people involved had to
say.
The show also allowed us to represented gender equally. This is especially
prevalent in our vox pop…
Gender Representation
Techniques

7. Race/Ethnicity Representation
Techniques
First of all, in our David Bowie vox pop, the first voice we hear is that of
a woman with a strong Spanish accent. This is because we tried to get
the views of people from different ethnic backgrounds. From this you
can see the sort of impact that David Bowie had since people of different
ethnic background were effected by his passing.
Here we can see that David bowie was a international sensation
worldwide and was known everywhere. This represents race and
ethnicity as it involves the whole world
Our correspondent for the junior doctor shake up had a French
surname. This could connote that the person speaking came from a
family that emigrated to the UK. This represented ethnicity within the
Camden area as it included a person from a French ethnic
background, which is one of the many European background that
people in the UK come from.
Our local radio news bulletin represented both race and ethnicity through
people used in our audio and people involved in the stories.

8. When creating our vox pox, in order to show more
diversity among different races in Camden we interview
those of different ethnic decent. This also adds to the
awareness of the impact that David Bowie had
worldwide. Plus the way he spoke was seen to be mix of
Afro-Caribbean decent for his use of words to be quite
“slangy” eg “to do that is… like… amazing”
In one of our stories, a Muslim person of
probably East African descent was a
criminal in one of our stories. The name
Ahmed is a common Muslim name. This
person also appeared to be from East
Africa, as seen in his mug shot.
Race/Ethnicity Representation
Techniques

9. Age Representation
Techniques
One of our vox pop respondents kept saying the word “like”
which is informal and known to be used a lot among the
youth of today whereas the older people that we talked to
spoke in a much more formal matter speaking only in Oxford
English. This is also seen as “slangy”, which is a combination
of words from Afro-Caribbean descent.
In this example this person said that they used to listen to
David bowie when they were younger. This highlights the
importance that David Bowie had on many people growing
up.

10. Concluding, “how does your media product
represent particular social groups?”
• Through the presenter choosing how to talk about others. See
examples above.
• Through how others are shown or allowed to speak for themselves.
• Through how the editing team chose to include the news item in the
bulletin (in any one day there are potentially hundreds of news stories
that could be broadcast but only very few are).
• Through indexical signifiers (sound effects, atmos) accompanying or
contextualizing the voices of the news items e.g in our junior doctor
shake up story, our correspondent is present in a hospital.