Development Of Preschool Children’s Gender-orientation Clothing Projective Test

Pre-school period is critical for the bud and development of children’s gender consciousness, gender identity problems will be caused by improper education at this period.Children are born to be his biological sex, after that girls put on pink clothes while boys put on blue clothes, this different way of treatment is the beginning of children’s appropriate gender roles. In realistic society, however, many parents and early childhood educators are not aware of this, some parents even fond of boys in girl’s clothing and girls in boy’s clothing, this behavior seriously interfere with the child’s own gender aesthetic consciousness, and may further affect the sex role behavior. From the calibration of biological sex to the cognition of stereotype impression, then to the construction of social gender roles, clothing plays an important role during the whole period. In this test, clothing pictures are introduced as independent test materials, children’s gender aesthetic preference of the clothing is the starting point, and the projective method is used to examine the gender orientation. Combining costume aesthetics with psychology is a theoretical and methodological exploration and innovation.-From the point of the reality,The construction of this test provides new ideas and new tools for the domestic survey of pre-school children’s gender orientation, and timely understanding children’s gender orientation, to early find the problem and early intervention will also have good enlightenment and help for family gender education.The existing tests or scales abroad such as children IT scale (Brown,1956), paintings test (Billet,1968), gender roles acquisition test (Edelbrock&Sugawara,1978), preschool children’s activity questionnaire (Golombok S&Rust J,1978), the Bern sex role inventory (Bern,1974), children’s gender role questionnaire (Boldizar,1991), domestic, such as children’s gender role questionnaire (Xue Yi ling,2008), etc, are all committed to survey preschool children’s sexual orientation, but in material selection, use of methods and assessment the results, there are some deficiencies more or less. The dress itself as a means of showing explicit gender identity, largely exert a subtle influence on children’s gender identity from the outside to the inside.(Susan B.Kaiser,2000). In the clothing aesthetic preferences, children themselves have a lot of gender differences. In view of this, the test construction is mainly from the following several aspects:(1) Detail definition and literature review are made around a few keywords including pre-school children, gender orientation, clothing, projective test,which aims to provide theoretical support as well as more specific ideas for the further test construction.(2) Preliminary establishment is achieved in strict accordance with the test process. Including3groups (each group is included by female, male and interfere three dimensions) consisting of a total of9pieces of children’s clothing pictures and a form that can be used for survey projective test.(3) The results of the reliability and validity of test show that the homogeneity reliability vary between0.925and0.990, half reliability vary between0.818and0.897, at the same time, the logic analysis show that the test has high content validity, and confirmatory factor analysis show that the test has higher structure validity.(4) To examine the discrimination we found that children of different gender orientation have a very significant difference (P<0.01) on the scores of both male and female pictures, while by examining the scores on interfere pictures, only undifferentiated individuals will be distinguished (P <0.05). When scores on interfere dimension is both higher than male and female dimensions score, they can tell the participants are largely undifferentiated individuals (here not rule out a few of masculinity and femininity and double phenomenon exist), the results show that the interfere dimension in the test has significantly auxiliary function, namely, when necessary, can be used for preliminary screening of undifferentiated individuals.(5) According to the whole process and implementation of the test, the test manual are completed and some subjects are extracted for validation. This manual consists of the prolegomenon, introduction, test and grading, quality report, and appendix (test material and cast form).(6) According to the results of the test, whether boys or girls, most of their gender orientations are consistent with their own biological gender (proportions are as high as90.1%and90.1%respectively), there are also some anti-sex, androgyny and undifferentiated phenomenon. Each gender orientation have no significant difference (P>0.05) on region and age.No matter from the structure or from the implementation, the psychological development characteristics of pre-school children are fully considered in the test. It is intuitive and convenient as to stimulate children’s interest; On the base of using male and female scores as the division standard of gender orientation, and project proposal will interfere with the dimension scores into account, we suggest to add interfere dimension to be the basis of preliminary screening undifferentiated individuals; Test manual is compiled and verified, the possible several types of gender orientation are detailed listed, combination of subjective and objective way to explain the results, are also adopted, which aims to confirm the feasibility of the test itself and give users a more intuitive understanding of the test.