Hollywood Relationship Age Gaps Over Time

Author

Fabulous Evee
Whitman Ochiai, Katherine Chang, Shirley Yuan, Laura Gong, and Luis Miguel Malenab

Published

May 9, 2023

Topic Introduction

Research question: How has the concept of age gaps in Hollywood movies been shaped by the era in which the film was made and the genders of the characters that participate in them?

  • analyze trends of movie romantic age gaps throughout different eras of cinema

  • look into how genders’ roles in these age gaps have changed over time

  • understand how society’s shift in values and social standards have affected these age gaps

About the Data

The data we chose to work with details main romantic couples in Hollywood movies

variables of interest:

  • ages of actors

  • gender

  • movie release year

about the dataset

  • aim of witnessing changes in sociocultural perceptions of acceptable age gaps in romantic relationships

  • dataset funded by Ms. Lynn Fisher (@LynnandTonic on Twitter)

  • open to contributions from the public

Highlights from EDA

── Attaching packages ─────────────────────────────────────── tidyverse 1.3.2 ──
✔ ggplot2 3.4.2     ✔ purrr   1.0.0
✔ tibble  3.2.1     ✔ dplyr   1.1.2
✔ tidyr   1.2.1     ✔ stringr 1.5.0
✔ readr   2.1.3     ✔ forcats 0.5.2
── Conflicts ────────────────────────────────────────── tidyverse_conflicts() ──
✖ dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter()
✖ dplyr::lag()    masks stats::lag()
`geom_smooth()` using formula = 'y ~ x'
`geom_smooth()` using formula = 'y ~ x'
`geom_smooth()` using formula = 'y ~ x'
`geom_smooth()` using formula = 'y ~ x'
`geom_smooth()` using formula = 'y ~ x'

Inference/modeling/other analysis

General data: all categories combined

  • p-val 2.432e-13

  • cor -0.109

  • With each additional year, on average there’s a 0.109 decrease in the expected age gap

  • Null hypothesis - release year has no correlation with age gap

  • Alternative hypothesis - release year has correlation with age gap

  • The null hypothesis is rejected

Cont.

  • Four categories of couples:

    • homosexual (p-val 0.4587, cor 0.1625)

    • heterosexual (p-val 2.682e-14, cor -0.2231)

    • older man (p-val 5.302e-10, cor -0.2022)

    • older woman (p-val 0.2164, cor -0.0921)

Conclusions + future work

Conclusion:

  • The expected romantic age gaps for Hollywood moves have been decreasing over time

    • Increasing social aversion to couples with a power imbalance

    • Change in societal expectations for gender roles

    • More visible in and significant in heterosexual couples than in homosexual couples but may be due to a small sample size

  • Movies with older male romantic partners exhibit a statistically greater expected age gap than movies with older female partners

Future Work:

  • Compare how romantic age gaps from US films compare with those of international films, and international differences on the effect of other factors:

    • Release year

    • Older partner gender

    • Sexual orientation