A Comparative Study Of The Cultural Dimensions Embodied In Chinese And American Time Travel Television Series

The year of2011has witnessed an unprecedented prevalence of time traveltelevision series in China. Coincidentally during the same period of time in the empireof media, USA, TV series featuring Time-travel still remains as a hit on the screen.Since television is the display and reflection of the culture, a research topic thuspresents itself: how to develop an interdisciplinary comparison of the time-travel TVseries in China and USA from the intercultural perspective. Under the framework ofHofstede’s theory of cultural dimensions, the author develops an approach ofquantitative content analysis to probe into the cultural differences that the Chinese andAmerican TV series hold. Based on the scores of China and USA in the sixdimensions concluded by Hofstede as are mentioned in the thesis, three hypothesesconcerning the dimensions of UAI, MAS and IDV were proposed and tested after apilot survey1). USA would score higher on the IDV dimension than China.2). Chinawould score higher than USA in the MAS dimension.3). America would have ahigher score on the uncertainty avoidance dimension than China. A group of studentswho have watched both Palace and FlashForward were assigned to code the itemswhich are selected after a pilot survey. According to the data obtained from the codingprocedure, mean values of each executive item are generated. The data computation isconducted after the similar methodology that G. Hofstede has adopted in his researchfor the purpose to establish a valid comparison between Hofstede’s results and theresults of the present study.Two of the three hypotheses UAI and IDV have been confirmed by the study.On the dimension of UAI, no significant discrepancy has been observed between theresults found by Hofstede and the present study. On the dimension of IDV, a greaterdifference is discovered which shows that time travel shows of the two countriesexhibit nearly the same amount of individualism and the stereotype of the Chineseindividualism is being challenged. One contradiction is revealed in the study: theresult of the dimension of MAI goes completely against the previously proposedhypothesis, which indicates that more masculinity can be found in Chinese than inAmerican time travel television shows.