Gender Schema and Social Judgments: A Developmental Study of Children from Hong Kong

Sex Roles: A Journal of Research,  July, 2000  by Thalma E. Lobel,  Eva Bar-David,  Reut Gruber,  Sing Lau,  Yoram Bar-Tal

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Stage 2

Each child was presented with the four stories. Following each story the child was asked to answer the various questions. The stories and the questions were presented in a randomized order. The experimenter repeated each story in the middle of the questionnaire to refresh the children's memory. Similarly to Biernat (1991), each kindergarten child was interviewed and tested individually by an experimenter, whereas the third and sixth graders were tested in a group. Although it is preferable to use the same procedure with all ages, most studies that compare preschoolers to older children use such a procedure. Since kindergarten children cannot read, the only alternative would have been to read the questions to all age groups. We believe that in the present study, reading the questions to all children would have caused other problems. For example, older children are more sensitive to social desirability and hence the presence of the experimenter might influence their answers more than in the case of kindergarte n children. In addition, it might seem odd to older children that the questions are being read to them. It should be noted that we tried to make conditions as similar as possible by reading the kindergarten children exactly the same questions as presented in the questionnaires. We made sure that the kindergarten children were read the instructions and the questions in exactly the same words with no additional explanations. This procedure was similar to the one used in other studies dealing with gender-related inferences (e.g., Biernat, 1991).

RESULTS

Cognitive Inference

A set of regression analyses was performed to examine the effect of children's age, sex, and schematicity on their cognitive judgements. More specifically, we examined the effect of these variables on children's femininity and masculinity judgments of the counterstereotypic targets (i.e., the feminine male target and the masculine female target). In order to avoid confusion, since the sex of both the target and the participants is discussed, we differentiate between the two by referring to the target's sex as male and female and to the participant's sex as boy and girl. Table I presents the correlation matrix among the three independent variables (age, sex, and schematicity) and the four dependent variables (perceived masculinity and perceived femininity of the feminine male target, and perceived masculinity and perceived femininity of the masculine female target).

Table I shows that there are high positive correlation coefficients between judgments of femininity of the feminine male target and masculinity of the masculine female target, and between femininity of the masculine female target and the masculinity of the feminine male target. In addition, while age was positively correlated with the femininity attributed to the feminine male target and the masculinity attributed to the masculine female target, it was negatively correlated with the masculinity attributed to the feminine male target and with the femininity attributed to the masculine female target.