Enculturation

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