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Androgyny in Liking and in Being Liked Are Antecedent to Well-Being in Pre-Adolescent Boys and Girls

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Abstract

The present study is a two-wave longitudinal study of the concurrent and prospective associations between patterns of same- and other-gender liking and well-being in a sample of 403 fifth and sixth-grade girls and boys from Montréal Québec, Canada that was used to examine Sandra Bem’s perspective that androgyny is related to well-being. In our study androgyny was operationally defined as (a) the combination of liking for same- and other-gender peers and (b) the combination of being liked by same- and other-gender peers. Well-being was indexed with a measure of the self-concept. Findings drawn from analyses conducted with structural equation modeling showed that androgynous liking was an antecedent and a consequence of well-being. Specifically (a) Time 1 (T1) well-being was a predictor of how much girls and boys liked same-gender and other-gender peers at Time 2 (T2) whereas T2 well-being was predicted by how much girls and boys liked same- and other-gender peers at T1 and (b) T2 well-being was predicted by how much girls and boys were liked by same-gender and other-gender peers. These findings are discussed according to the dynamics of experiences with peers from one’s own gender and the other-gender.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the schools, teachers, principals, parents, the participants and all of those who helped with the data collection, especially Mr. Gordon Rosenoff and Ms. Felicia Meyer. This research was made possible by grants from The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds de recherche du Québec: Société et culture.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology and Centre de recherche en Développement Humain, Concordia University, 7141 ouest, rue Sherbrooke, Montréal, Québec, Canada, H4B 1R6

    William M. Bukowski & Bianca Panarello

  2. University of Nebraska, Omaha, USA

    Jonathan B. Santo

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  1. William M. Bukowski
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  2. Bianca Panarello
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  3. Jonathan B. Santo
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Correspondence to William M. Bukowski.

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The procedures of the study had been reviewed and approved by the institutional review board of the first author’s home institution. Each aspect of this project was conducted in accordance with the ethical principles of relevant scholarly societies including the Society for Research on Child Development (SRCD) and the American Psychological Association.

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Bukowski, W.M., Panarello, B. & Santo, J.B. Androgyny in Liking and in Being Liked Are Antecedent to Well-Being in Pre-Adolescent Boys and Girls. Sex Roles 76, 719–730 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-016-0638-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-016-0638-6

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