The Psychological Structure And Development Of Children's And Adolescents' Gender Stereotypes

In the past few years, as an important part of stereotypes, gender stereotypes have been an active focus in the field of social cognition. Gender stereotypes have had important effect on people's minds and behaviors since its occurrence. So it's of great importance to further the study of gender stereotypes. The structure and content of gender stereotypes are the basis of series studies on gender stereotypes. Although many researchers addressed the content of gender stereotypes, there has not been an effective scale to measure gender stereotypes. On the other hand, we found that from the perspective of the development of teenagers' gender stereotypes, there were many studies on gender stereotypes of different ages, but there is a lack of a systematic study in children's and adolescents' gender stereotypes. Researchers also pointed out that the measurement of implicit and explicit stereotypes have inconsistent experimental results, and could show a more comprehensive perspective on gender stereotypes. Therefore, the measurement of implicit gender stereotypes will be an important supplement to the research on gender stereotypes. Based on the exploration of gender stereotypes' structure, we use both explicit and implicit measurements to estimate gender stereotypes from different respects.This study took the following three steps: First, after three tests, we developed a Gender Stereotypes Scale, which proved to be reliable and valid by exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. Second, we analyzed the development of children's and adolescents' gender stereotypes based on Gender Stereotypes Scale. Third, Gender Stereotypes Scale, Implicit association Test and Stereotypic Explanatory Bias were employed to examine children's and adolescents' gender stereotypes in different ways.The study reveals that: (1) the construction of gender stereotypes contains four dimensions, namely, personality attributes including competence and warmth, gender role behaviors, occupations and appearance; (2) significant age differences of participants' gender stereotype were found in each factor; (3) gender differences were significant on male participants; in male scale, gender has significant effect on competence, occupations and appearance; in female scale gender has significant effect on warmth and occupations; (4) there was strong implicit gender stereotyping among young children; (5) there was little variation on traditional gender stereotyping about male; and gender stereotypes held by males was of little changed; (6) gender stereotyping about female changed indeed, but gender stereotypes held by females was inconsistent with traditional views; (7) measurements of participants' gender by IAT and SEB led to different results; (8) the results of explicit and implicit measurements are inconsistent.