My Final Post!

Well... here it is. My last post! My survey has officially been completed by all 10 children who I asked to fill it out. For the most part, they fell right into the gender socialization trap. The boys liked cars and trucks, the girls liked dolls. The boys liked blue and green, the girls liked pink and purple. However, there were notable exceptions (such as the one I wrote about last week) and there were plenty of gender neutral answers. Three of the children - two boys and one girl - said their favorite color was red. Another big surprise was my ten year old neighbor, Ben, who said that his best friend was Isabelle. At that in-between age, it is assumed that your best friend is the same gender as you, but Ben broke that stereotype with his girl best friend.

Overall, I wasn't surprised by my results. I had hoped to see some gender neutralization, and some answers that stood out to me as different. This did happen, along with the usual gender socialized answers one would expect. Who knows what could happen 20 years from now though. There were some gender-neutral answers here... maybe by then there will be even more.

Almost There...

After handing out the full survey to 10 children (6 boys and 4 girls), I have received 5 back, all from boys. These boys have answered, for the most part, true to what I expected. Their favorite toys were either Legos or Thomas the Tank Engine. Meanwhile, their favorite shows seemed to be gender-neutral shows on Disney Channel, which was nice to see, since it was better than being strictly male. One shocking answer came from my 7 year old neighbor, Christopher, who said that his favorite singer was Taylor Swift, which seemed to me to be a more feminine response than I would expect from him. I can't fully analyze my results until I have all of my surveys back, however, so by next week I'll be able to analyze them a little better.

The Details

The survey on childhood gender socialization has been completed! Some questions include "What's your favorite television show?" and "What's your favorite color?" I plan to administer the full survey to my neighbors and the children my sister Maggie babysits, in total 12 children - 7 boys and 5 girls between the ages of 4 and 12. I'm going to print out hard copies to give to them, and they'll return them the next day since we all live in the same town.

I'm predicting that boys will choose stereotypical "boy" answers... like for the favorite toys they'll choose trucks and for favorite color they'll choose blue. Likewise, I hypothesize that girls will choose "girl" answers... they'll say dolls and pink. Hopefully I will see some sort of crossover, though, because I would like to think that children are breaking stereotypes. After this survey, maybe I'll see some of that.