The current project aims at better understanding how narrative characteristics in stories function in the liking, moral evaluation, and enjoyment of narratives featuring morally ambiguous characters (MACs). Shafer and Raney (2012) found that viewers differently enjoyed a heroic versus MAC-centered narrative. Building on this approach, a mixed-method design was used to investigate character development in two morally ambiguous narratives. Results of both a qualitative content analysis and an experiment provide support for the claim that character development is a central mechanism to explain viewer responses to MACs in narrative content. Thus, this study provides new directions for understanding characters in media research.
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According to Zillmann (2000) viewers function as “untiring moral monitors”; relentlessly coming to moral judgments about the actions and motives of protagonists and antagonists. How does this “moral monitoring” apply to morally ambiguous crime TV drama that features unlawful protagonists? The current exploratory study is based on qualitative interviews (N = 3 × 20) that aimed to provide insight in the grounds of moral evaluations of three selected episodes of mobster drama series The Sopranos. Viewers of three distinctive moral subcultures (i.e., prisoners, law enforcement agents, and civilians) were interviewed. The results revealed that the majority of prisoners and law enforcement agents grounded their moral evaluations mostly in their professional opinions and experiences, and came to fairly strict, yet different moral evaluations. In contrast, most of the civilians had a more “lenient” association with narratives and characters. Civilians generally based their evaluations on the morally ambiguous story world, and therefore showcased more nuances in their moral judgments.
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This study analyses how the social construction of integrity takes place within the context of football in the Netherlands. Combining a contextual approach to sports integrity with the analytic lens of sensemaking, this qualitative multi-method case study analyses – in one extreme case in Dutch youth amateur football – why and when the ‘incident’ was perceived as an ‘integrity issue’, and how the meaning of (the) integrity (issue) was socially constructed by (interactions between) stakeholders involved in the case. Our findings show why, when, and how moral norms and values are (not) debated and at stake, and that the social construction of sports integrity is intertwined with the institutional context and the role of secondary stakeholders. It provides insights that can help sports organizations to identify risks in their moral sports culure and to develop measures or policies to safeguard integrity in sport.
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