Example 11.28 Sexual Imagery in Advertisements

Marketers sometimes use sexual imagery in advertisements targeted at teens and young adults. One study designed to examine this issue analyzed how models were dressed in 1509 ads in magazines read by young and mature adults.¹⁷ The clothing of the models in the ads was classified as not sexual or sexual. Logistic regression was used to model the probability that the model’s clothing was sexual as a function of four explanatory variables.¹⁸ Here, model clothing with values 1 for sexual and 0 for not sexual is the response variable.

The explanatory variables were , a variable having the value 1 if the median age of the readers of the magazine is 20 to 29 and 0 if the median age of the readers of the magazine is 40 to 49; , the gender of the model, coded as 1 for female and 0 for male; , a code to indicate men’s magazines, with values 1 for a men’s magazine and 0 otherwise; and , a code to indicate women’s magazines, with values 1 for a women’s magazine and 0 otherwise. General-interest magazines are coded as 0 for both and .

The fitted model is