Research Update

My research project for this trip is centered on the question: Does gender of children affect which characters they want to meet? I went about this research in two ways: interviews with cast members and guests and observations of the different character lines. To make things easier, I divided the characters into four types: animal characters, male characters, princesses, and Disney Junior characters. (The last category was added to the other three during the research process when it was discovered that the results were different for it.) I did research in both Walt Disney World and Disneyland, except for the Disney Junior characters, which I only found in Walt Disney World.

Based on my research, children of both genders equally want to meet animal characters. I observed lines to meet Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, and Daisy Duck in both Disney World and Disneyland. (I left out Mickey Mouse because I thought that he might be an outlier as he’s a center attraction in many ways.) I think that this might be because characters like Mickey and friends and Winnie the Pooh and friends may seem un-gendered to many children. They are marketed equally to boys and girls.

I also observed lines for male characters like Woody, Buzz Lightyear, and Gaston. I discovered that it appears that both boys and girls nearly equally want to meet male characters. However, Gaston appears to be an outlier since the line to meet him was nearly always full of high school or college-aged young women.

I discovered that almost exclusively girls meet the Disney princesses. In all my research I only saw two boys in lines for princess meet-and-greets without a sister with them. Interviews with cast members also confirmed that they rarely see boys who aren’t “dragged in” by a sister. At our meeting with Guy Selga, he pointed out that Disney even markets the princess meet-and-greets specifically to girls. Surprisingly, I found this was even true for newer, less traditionally feminine princesses like Anna and Elsa, Tiana, and Merida.

In Hollywood Studios in Walt Disney World, there is a special courtyard brimming with children where they can meet characters from Disney Junior TV shows. I found that equal numbers of boys and girls line up to meet Doc McStuffins, Jake (of Jake and the Neverland Pirates), and Princess Sofia (of Sofia the First). I think this might have to do with the fact that the children in these lines were generally quite young, mostly below the age of six years old. I’m curious to see if I can find research that supports the idea that gender differentiation largely occurs after this age.

While I expected that there might be some differences in the data that I collected in Walt Disney World and Disneyland, there were none detected. I had hypothesized that the West Coast park, being in a more liberal setting, might have less strict gender roles in place. However, this doesn’t appear to be the case based on what I’ve found thus far.

Overall, my predictions about gender and meeting characters appear to be fairly accurate though my thoughts about differences occurring on opposite sides of the country were incorrect.