The fındıngs of martın and halverson who are founder of thıs theory
As we can understood from this experiment, for younger children it is not easy to change their gender schemas, and gender roles accordingly. Martin and Halverson(1981) improved the gender schema theory,and they included sub-theories to which are in-group, out-group, and creating own schema theories. According to Martin and Halverson(1981), when a girl saw a doll she will go through a schematic process like "dolls are for girls, I am a girl, dolls are for me," and she can think that dolls are in-group for her, and she creates an own schema by using her previous schemas and saying "dolls are for me. " However, when she sees trucks, she may think, "I am a girl, trucks are for boys" then, she is not going to play with trucks because trucks are out-group for her. Before investigating the program, we knew that we will find lots of gender stereotypes about playthings and clothes. According to Bandura(1977, it is cited in Martin and Halverson,1981), these schemas form children's future, setting goals, making plans, and behavior routines to implement these plans. We can say that gender schemas and gender stereotypes that are created through gender schemas affect children's future lives and their choices about their experiences. For example, if a child believes that being an engineer is not appropriate for the female because it requires analytical thinking and competitive skills in the future they may not prefer to be an engineer as an occupation. When gender-stereotyped children encounter new information or the new schema that is not appropriate with the previous schema, children tend to ignore or deny it. To prove it, Martin and Halverson(1983) conducted an experiment on 48 children; they took equal numbers from both genders; 24 females and 24 males and they showed 16 pictures that do not consist with the children's existing schema like male actor holding a doll, one week after they took these children again and the same pictures were asked to understand whether they remember or not, they found that children's answers were not similar with the real pictures. Thus, the new information that does not match with the existing schema (inconsistent schema such as male with doll) turned into a consistent one, they remembered a picture that a man was holding a doll as a female was holding a doll.As we can understood from this experiment, for younger children it is not easy to change their gender schemas, and gender roles accordingly which affect their whole live.
Further Research Recommendations It is recommended to check the original article of Bem, S. (1983). Gender Schema Theory and Its Implications for Child Development: Raising Gender-Aschematic Children in a Gender-Schematic Society. Signs, 8(4), 598-616. Retrieved May 3, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/3173685 Reference for this section Martin, C., & Halverson, C. (1981). A Schematic Processing Model of Sex Typing and Stereotyping in Children. Child Development, 52(4), 1119-1134. |
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