Toy Research Project

For this project, you will collect and analyze data on how race, ethnicity, and gender manifest in contemporary toys. You will need to go to an online retail site where toys are sold (e.g: Target.com, toysrus.com). Once there, you will record data about the toys you observe and later you will analyze, using course material and concepts, this data in your project report, drawing out deeper social themes and issues. In your report, you should briefly describe how you conducted your research (the location where you
collected data; how you conducted your data collection) and what you found in your research (i.e., the key patterns that emerged).

Things to consider:
1.How the racial and ethnic diversity of toy characters (and/or toy models) compares to the actual racial and ethnic diversity of the United States?
2. How race and ethnicity are encoded into toys
3. Whether and how racial and ethnic stereotypes manifest in toys and/or in the social roles embedded in toys
4. The relationship(s) between race/ethnicity and gender in toys
5. How racial and ethnic messages in toys might affect children (or not)

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