I've read through your blog posts and found a nice range of topics that we'll be covering as a class this semester. I'm already really looking forward to your oral presentations at the end of the semester! Don't forget to follow a few of your classmates' blogs and to start commenting. I know quite a few of you have already started doing that, but a friendly reminder never hurts.
As I explained in my first blog post, I will be providing you with sample posts throughout the semester. The topic I'm addressing is gender stereotypes in sport participation. Specifically, I'm interested in how true it is that sports are more appropriate for boys than girls.
One approach to evaluating the veracity of this stereotype is to examine what attitudes people hold about girls' sport participation. Brown, Ruel, and Medley-Rath (2011) asked the question "What do high school students' believe about girls' sport participation?" In their review of the previous literature, they explained that the majority of research suggests that children and adolescents continue to hold stereotypic views about sport participation, even in the 21st century. Children are still likely to assume that some sports are appropriate for boys only (i.e., football) and others are only for girls (i.e., figure skating) and that girls shouldn't play on the same teams as boys.
In their study, Brown, Ruel, and Medley-Rath (2011) took advantage of a large national longitudinal data set designed to evaluate adolescents' transition from high school to post-secondary education. The authors analyzed high school students' attitudes about increasing sport opportunities for girls and examined how those attitudes may vary by gender and athletic participation. In terms of supporting the stereotype, their findings were mixed. Female high school students, competitive athletes and non-athletes alike, were more supportive of increasing sport participation for girls than male high school students, especially the male competitive athletes. Before we get too upset about the male athletes being sexist, though, the students generally had favorable and egalitarian attitudes about sport participation, contrary to the previous research about younger children.
These data suggest two explanations. First, it could be that adolescents become more accepting of gender-role transgressions with age and so, this is a developmental issue. On the other hand, our culture may be more accepting of girls playing sports than it was in the past and that cultural shift explains why the high school students were pretty accepting of girls getting more opportunities to play. Unfortunately, this one study can't eliminate either explanation. I need to review additional studies to identify a pattern of findings and to look for historical differences (i.e., comparing older studies with current studies). I'm also curious to see what we may find with a study that includes multiple cohorts, such as young children, high school students, and older adults. Stay tuned for my next blog post to see if I have any luck tracking down a study like that!
p.s. This blog post was about 475 words long which is about as long as I want your posts to be.
Reference:
Brown, M., Ruel, E., & Medley-Rath, S. (2011). High school students’ attitudes toward providing girls opportunities to participate in sport. Sociology of Sport Journal, 28, 239-253.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Welcome to the course!
If you are reading this post, you are most likely an MCLA student enrolled in PSYC 356 Psychology of Gender in the Fall 2011 semester. It's been a couple of years since I've had the opportunity to teach this course and I hope you're as excited as I am to get started.
I am particularly excited about this blogging assignment. I've used a variation of this gender stereotype analysis assignment in previous semesters, but I think using a blog will really allow all of you to fully exercise your creative muscles. There are so many ways to customize a blog and this digital format also gives you the opportunity to augment your writing with a wide variety of graphics and even video.
So, here's a little background about me that may help explain the rationale behind this blog. I've been interested in gender issues for just about as long as I can remember. I was an active and athletic girl in the very early years of the Title IX era. Not very many girls were playing sports, but that didn't stop me. I was frequently the only girl on my baseball, soccer, and basketball teams and often faced sexist judgments from both the boys I played with and the parents who coached me. I really didn't believe the stereotype that boys are better at sports than girls and it became my mission, at the tender age of 8, to prove it wrong to anyone who watched me play. And so, my lifelong feminism began. As a graduate student, I was always drawn to research questions that challenged conventional wisdom about gender and I even completed a dissertation about gender development in early adolescence. This gender stereotype analysis assignment is a natural outgrowth of my early personal experiences as well as my graduate training in gender development.
I will use the stereotype that "boys are better at sports than girls" in my future blog posts to help demonstrate what I'm looking for in your own blog posts. This first post can serve as a model of what I expect from your first one. I've written about 400 words here so this is your target length, too. You'll notice that this post isn't very long, so you'll have to work hard at being concise!
Please post a comment to let me know that you've read this post and the assignment distributed in class and understand what you need to do. If you have any questions, feel free to post those as well. Can't wait to start reading all of your blogs!
I am particularly excited about this blogging assignment. I've used a variation of this gender stereotype analysis assignment in previous semesters, but I think using a blog will really allow all of you to fully exercise your creative muscles. There are so many ways to customize a blog and this digital format also gives you the opportunity to augment your writing with a wide variety of graphics and even video.
So, here's a little background about me that may help explain the rationale behind this blog. I've been interested in gender issues for just about as long as I can remember. I was an active and athletic girl in the very early years of the Title IX era. Not very many girls were playing sports, but that didn't stop me. I was frequently the only girl on my baseball, soccer, and basketball teams and often faced sexist judgments from both the boys I played with and the parents who coached me. I really didn't believe the stereotype that boys are better at sports than girls and it became my mission, at the tender age of 8, to prove it wrong to anyone who watched me play. And so, my lifelong feminism began. As a graduate student, I was always drawn to research questions that challenged conventional wisdom about gender and I even completed a dissertation about gender development in early adolescence. This gender stereotype analysis assignment is a natural outgrowth of my early personal experiences as well as my graduate training in gender development.
I will use the stereotype that "boys are better at sports than girls" in my future blog posts to help demonstrate what I'm looking for in your own blog posts. This first post can serve as a model of what I expect from your first one. I've written about 400 words here so this is your target length, too. You'll notice that this post isn't very long, so you'll have to work hard at being concise!
Please post a comment to let me know that you've read this post and the assignment distributed in class and understand what you need to do. If you have any questions, feel free to post those as well. Can't wait to start reading all of your blogs!
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