Abstract
Qualitative and quantitative aspects of children’s knowledge of sex-role stereotypes were investigated using two sets of 28 stimuli, descriptive of behaviors and personality attributes. Two hundred nineteen Dutch 10-and 12-year-old boys and girls, attending either “traditional” or “progressive” schools, were tested. Children’s attribution of individual stimuli to the categories of men (M), women (F), or both sexes (N) showed that personality attributes were categorized as either M or F more often than were behaviors. Younger children, those attending a progressive school, and girls categorized stimuli as M or F less often than did the other groups. Interactions between sex, age, and type of school were also observed. A comparison of 10-year-old Dutch and Italian children showed the latter to be more sex-stereotyped. Multidimensional scaling analyses of proximity matrices for separate subsets of the total sample enabled the detection of differences among groups for each set of stimuli, in terms of amount and type of clustering of stimuli in the resulting two-dimensional configurations. These results paralleled those obtained on the basis of the frequency data.
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The author wishes to thank Willem Heiser of the University of Leiden for his advice and help on the statistical analysis, the Experimental Psychology Unit of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Leiden for its hospitality when this research was carried out, and E. Grummels and P. Gho for administering the task to subjects and for their help with data coding and analysis.
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Zammuner, V.L. Perception of male and female personality attributes and behaviors by Dutch children. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 31, 87–90 (1993). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03334147
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03334147