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Studies
Martin and Halverson (1983) Terms to define
Enculturation
Gender roles
Schemas
Social cognitive theory
Martin and Halverson (1983) Aim
To ivestigade the role of gender schema on a child’s ability to recall information that was not consistent with their gender schema
Martin and Halverson (1983) Procedure
Sample of 48 young children all enrolled in local kindergartens
They were given a test (SERLI) to assess their level of gender stereotyping prior to the experiment
Then, they were presented with 16 pictures, featuring males and females in activities that are either in line with gender schemas (e.x. a girl playing with a doll) or inconsistent with gender role schemas (e.x. a girl playing with a toy gun)
They were asked to identify the sex of the person in the picture (man, woman, boy or girl)
They were not told that they had to remember the images A week later they were asked to remember what they saw in the pictures (probed recall procedure)
They were asked about the pictures they already had seen and 8 new ones they hadn’t (the 8 new ones were included to test for response bias)
Children were asked “Do you remember seeing a picture of something doing (activity) in the pictures I showed you last week?
Then, they asked them if the person they remember seeing was a girl, boy, man, woman or ‘don’t remember’
Also asked to rate their level of confidence on a four-point scale
Martin and Halverson (1983) Results
For pictures with female actors, activities consistent with gender stereotypes, were more often rememberd than inconsistnt activities
For pictures with male actors, activities inconsistent with the stereotypes were remembered more
Male stereotyping is more defined and rigid than for females in this population
Regardless of their level of stereotyping, children had distorted memories of pictures that were inconsistent with the gender stereotypes
Children were more confident and had less distortion of memory when the stories were consistent with their gender schema
Martin and Halverson (1983) Evaluation
Supports theory that stereotypes affect both encoding and retrival of information
There were erros made by children that made the sex consistent with gender stereotypes
Not completely generalizable to the entierty of the population due to chanages in individual stereotype schemas
Fagot (1978) Terms to define
Enculturation
Gender roles
Schemas
Social cognitive theory
Fagot (1978) Aim
The role that parents may play in gender role development
Fagot (1978) Procedure
Sample of 24 families (half with a son a half with a daughter)
Both parents lived at home and all families were white
Observers used an observation checklist of 46 child behaviors and 19 reactions by parents
Five 60-minute observations completed for each family over a five-week period
Using time sampling, they made note of the child’s behavior every 60 secs and then noting the parents response to the behavior of their child
Two of the observers were used to establish inter-code reliability
Fagot (1978) Results
Parents reacted significantly more favorably to the child when the child was engaged in the same sex preferred behavior; children were more likely to recieve negative responses to cross-sex preferred behaviors.
Parents gave girls more positive responses when they engaged in adult oriented, dependent behavior
Fathers were more concerned about enforcing traditional gender roles tha mothers
Girls recieved more positive responses when asking for help, while boys were given more negative responses for the same action
Girls were criticized more for participating in large motor activities (e.x. running, jumping)
Girls recieves more postive and boys more negative responses when playing with dolls
Fagot (1978) Evaluation
Enculturation and studies general evaluation
Difficulty measuring enculturation
Lack of ecological validity
Lack of internal validity
Lack of temporal validity (studies are rather old)
No measure of biological factors
Difficulty knowing which behaviors are learned and which may be pre-programed genetically
