One of the findings of this study which analyses the gender aspects of children’s programs on national television broadcasts is that in the programs from an in-house production, the public service as well as private national televisions, is dominated by social values that are typical for a patriarchal social system.

The study – a product of a full-scale research of the Research Institute on Social Development – RESIS for the regulatory needs of the Agency for Audio and Audiovisual Media Services, through the analysis of seven scales of dichotomy of semantic differentials, amongst other findings – confirms that in the in-house production of narrative or film genres, the male roles undoubtedly have superior social markers. They are represented as smarter, stronger and more active in comparison with the female roles that are mainly represented as shallow-minded, weaker and more passive than the male roles. The analysis of the scales also showed that the male roles are in dominant position and the females are subordinated.

“Analysis of the gender aspects in children’s programs on the national terrestrial television” is an original accomplishment and it is the first quantitative, more importantly, a qualitative penetration into the gender questioning and representation of men and women within children’s programs in this country. In this research all children’s programs that were broadcasted on MRT1 and MRT2 – programs on Albanian language, TV Alfa, TV Kanal 5, TV Sitel, TV Telma and TV Alsat M, in the period from 15th of September to 15th of October 2019 are included. In total of 520 broadcasts from an in-house or foreign production, with duration of more than 200 hours, a gender analysis was implemented on over 4553 characters out of which 2657 were female, 1842 were male and 54 with no specified gender.
The findings from this research in which beside the narrative and film genre, musical, conversational and hybrid programs were also analysed, resulted from a combination of methods by gathering and analysing data – Analysis of the content (a research technique which shows quantitative and qualitative indexes), as well as applying a Discourse and Thematic analysis (qualitative research techniques).

The media, as a key output of discourse are oftentimes producing politically soaked normative imprint about gender roles and how men and women’s bodies should look like. The evidence that the children programs are not an exception to this, as well as the suggestions about what should be done moving forward, in a regulatory and broadcasting sense can be found in the study done by RESIS Institute.