• Question: why did you choose to study specifically children?

    Asked by anon-283934 to Helena on 5 Mar 2021.
    • Photo: Helena Paterson

      Helena Paterson answered on 5 Mar 2021:

      Hello Mia,
      Thanks for your question. There are 2 reasons that I started studying gender stereotypes in children. Firstly, I have children myself and I was interested in how they learned stereotypes and what the effect of stereotypes might be on them.

      Secondly, as soon as I started looking into this, I realised that we actually don’t have really good tools to measure stereotypes in children (or evening adults) so decided to try to make some tools and that is what my research is about now.

Comments

  • Photo: anon-283934

    anon-283934 commented on :

    thanks for your reply. that’s actually really interesting; stereotypes are such a big part of society. what kind of techniques are you looking into to hopefully measure them?

    • Photo: Helena

      Helena commented on :

      We typically go to public spaces like museums and the science centre herein Glasgow to gather data, so the space is noise and we get to have children between 3 and 12 mostly to take part. So we need simple tasks that are fun to do.
      We ask kids to make drawings of characters and then give them a name. We can then analyse those drawings a little. We also do short reaction time experiments where children pick toys for a present and we see if it takes longer to react when questions go against a stereotype. We also have a task where children pick who they want to play with from images. Finally, we simply ask children to tell us stuff – like what they want to be when they grow up, who their favourite TV character is, what they like to do.

      We sometimes ask the parents with them to also take part and then see how responses by adults and children match or don’t match.
      The most interesting thing we have found so far is the gender stereotypes do not always come from the home, instead, it is society that impacts what stereotypes children hold, just the same as for adults.