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Gender-related assessment of childhood play

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Abstract

Parent-report based scales for the assessment of sex-dimorphic behavior are an important tool in research on psychosexual differentiation and its disorders. This paper presents the factor analysis and corresponding scale development for the slightly expanded Child Game Participation Questionnaire (Bates & Bentler, 1973), based on the parents of a demographically diverse school sample of 355 girls and 333 boys aged 6 to 10 years. Evidence supporting each of three theoretical positions in gender assessment — unidimensional bipolar, two-dimensional unipolar, and multidimensional — was provided. Effect sizes were unusually large for gender, but small for age, socioeconomic level, and race/ethnicity.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. New York State Psychiatric Institute, and Department of Psychiatry, College of Physicians & Surgeons of Columbia University, New York, New York

    Heino F. L. Meyer-Bahlburg, Curtis L. Dolezal & Thomas J. Yager

  2. Children's Hospital of Buffalo, and Departments of Psychiatry and Pediatrics, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York

    David E. Sandberg

Authors
  1. Heino F. L. Meyer-Bahlburg
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  2. David E. Sandberg
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  3. Curtis L. Dolezal
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  4. Thomas J. Yager
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Additional information

This research was supported in part by a NICHD postdoctoral fellowship (NRSA HD06726; sponsor: Dr. Meyer-Bahlburg) awarded to Dr. Sandberg, by grants to Dr. Ehrhardt and Dr. Meyer-Bahlburg from the Spencer Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and NIMH (center grant 2-P50-MH43520, Anke A. Ehrhardt, Ph.D., Principal Investigator), and by the NIMH Clinical Research Center grant MH-30906.

We thank the children and parents who participated in the study. Dr. Jacob Cohen consulted on statistical matters. Ms. Patricia Connolly provided word processing services. A portion of this work was presented as a poster at the XIth Biennial Meeting of the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development, Minneapolis, Minnesota, July 3–7, 1991 (Abstracts, p. 285).

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Meyer-Bahlburg, H.F.L., Sandberg, D.E., Dolezal, C.L. et al. Gender-related assessment of childhood play. J Abnorm Child Psychol 22, 643–660 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02171993

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02171993

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