A Research On The Development Of Gender-role Attitudes In Middle School Students, And The Relationship With Parents' Gender-related Cognition

The study examined the development of gender-role attitudes in middle school students, and the influences parents' gender-role attitudes and expectations on children's gender roles had. Questionnaires and computer-based experiment were carried out, including three parts below.The first part of the study examined 497 middle school students' (243boys and 253 girls) and their parents' gender-role attitudes. It was found that children's gender-role attitudes were quite different within different domains, specifically, the most egalitarian in domain of social right and duty, and the least traditional in domain of occupational interest and work. Gender differences were found in the development trends of gender-role attitudes in middle school students, that was, girls had more egalitarian attitudes, and experienced mild change, whereas boys had more traditional attitudes and experienced more change toward egalitarian during the period of middle school, and gender difference of gender-role attitudes between boys and girls decreased. It was also found that children's and parents' gender-role attitudes were significantly correlated, that was, when parents had more traditional attitudes, their children's attitudes were more traditional than those whose parents holding more egalitarian attitudes.The second part examined parents' expectation on children's gender roles and children's perceptions of those expectations, and compared the different effects they had on children's gender-role attitudes. It was found that parents' expectation and children's perceptions were undifferentiated for boys but differentiated for girls, specifically, girls perceived more expectations for masculine than parents' reported. Additionally, the perceived expectations were more related with children's gender-role attitudes than parents' reported expectations.The last part of the study assessed implicit gender-role attitudes of 130 middle school students with single-category implicit association test (SC-IAT). Two kinds of implicit attitudes were assessed, including work/family attitude and trait/relationship attitude. It was found that boys held positive attitudes toward traditional thoughts and negative attitudes toward egalitarian thoughts, while girls had positive attitudes toward both traditional and egalitarian thoughts. On the other hand, boys held traditional work/family attitude and traditional trait/relationship attitude, whereas girls held traditional work/family attitude and egalitarian trait/relationship attitude. Girls' explicit gender-role attitude and implicit gender-role attitude were incongruous.