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Kimball (1986)
The social cognitive theory argues that we may be
enculturated by observing the behavior of others.
This includes the development of our gender roles
and/or gender identity.

Trying to determine the role of social factors in

behavior is a difficult task as experimental work that
is also naturalistic is rarely able to isolate variables.
This is why a series of studies done in the 1980s
when television was introduced to remote
communities in places like Canada was important.
They allowed for natural experiments that, although
they cannot establish actual causality, help us to see
the potential role of media on one's gender role
development.

Background information

The sociocultural approach argues that media - whether it be digital or paper - can have a significant effect
on our behavior. The social cognitive theory argues that the modeling of behaviors by characters that
children identify with, or want to identify with, will affect their own behavior. One behavior that has been
explored with regard to the role of modeling in the media is the development of gender roles and gender
stereotyping.

Social cognitive theory is based on two basic mechanisms of learning. The first is modeling. The theory
argues that children learn gendered behavior by watching others, including parents, peers, teachers, and
the media. Children learn best from same-gender models. In addition, children learn to imitate behavior if
the model is rewarded for his/her behavior. Finally, attractive role models are particularly influential.

The second mechanism of social cognitive theory is direct tuition, in which children are encouraged and
rewarded for engaging in behaviors considered appropriate for their sex, and are discouraged from gender-
inappropriate activities. Parents play an important role in this way of learning as they are the ones that
provide toys for their children and choose what to read them before going to bed at night. However, once a
child enters preschool, peers also engage in direct tuition by reinforcing gender-typed toy selection and
gendered behavior.

The following classic study looked at the role of television in the development of gender stereotypes in
elementary school children.

Procedure and results

Kimball (1986) carried out a natural experiment, taking advantage of the introduction of television in a
remote area of Canada. She wanted to see if exposure to "normal television viewing" would lead to a
change in the level of gender stereotyping in a Northern Canadian community.

The participants were 536 children in four different communities. The sample consisted of 130 children
from Notel (that is, No Television), 135 from Unitel (one station), 166 from Multitel (more than one station),
and 105 from Vancouver. Both Unitel and Multitel were from the same geographic region. Vancouver was
used as a control.

The children's level of gender stereotyping was measured using the Sex Role Differentiation (SRD) scale.
The SRD asks children to rate how appropriate or frequent certain behaviors are for boys and girls their
own age, as well as how often their mothers or fathers perform certain tasks.

The SRD was administered to all students in grades 6 and 9 in each of the three towns both before and 2
years after television was introduced to Notel. The control group's data was obtained from a previous study
that was carried out 8 months before this study began.

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The children filled in the questionnaire during normal
class time. Since information about the children's parents
was requested, the responses were anonymous.

Before their town had television, Notel children held more

egalitarian gender attitudes than children who viewed
television regularly. Girls had lower levels of gender
stereotyping than boys at the beginning of the study.

Two years after Notel obtained television, gender

stereotyping had significantly increased in both the
NOTEL boys and girls. In Phase 2, there was no
significant difference between the gender stereotyping
scores among the boys in the three towns. When looking
more carefully at the subscales on the SRD, the Notel
boys' stereotypes with regard to gender and jobs had
increased significantly.

The study supports that the introduction of television

increased levels of gender stereotyping.

* If you would like to read a graphic "novel" about this study, please see Stuart McMillan's fantastic site.

Evaluation

The study is a natural experiment, so ecological validity is high. However, since the researcher did not
manipulate the independent variable, participants were not randomly allocated to conditions, and there was
no ability to control for extraneous variables, the study has low internal validity and causality cannot be
determined.

The study is quite dated, so it is difficult to determine the study's temporal validity - that is, whether the
findings can be generalized to modern society. However, there is modern research that shows similar
findings (see the box below).

Since the data were anonymous, this means that the researchers did not compare data from Phase 1 and
Phase 2 for specific children. Instead, the study is cross-sectional. The researchers could not see
changes in the gender stereotypes of individual children over time.

Going deeper

Coyne et al (2016) examined children's level of engagement with Disney Princess media and gender-
stereotypical behavior.

Participants consisted of 198 children (mean age of 4.8 years old). The children were tested twice,
approximately one year apart. Longitudinal findings showed that Disney Princess engagement was
associated with more female gender-stereotypical behavior 1 year later.

The researchers argue that being "feminine" is not a problem. However, stereotypical female behavior may
potentially be problematic if girls believe that their opportunities in life are limited because of preconceived
notions regarding gender or if they avoid the types of exploration and activities that are important to
children learning about the world in order to conform to stereotypical notions about femininity (Coyne, p
1921).

Dinella (2013) found that grown women who self-identified as “princesses” gave up more easily on a
challenging task, were less likely to want to work, and were more focused on superficial qualities.

Casey, Novick, and Lourenco (2021) recently published a study to investigate how gender-stereotyped
roles in children's books have changed since 1960. They analyzed 3280 children's books published
between 1960 and 2020 to determine the proportion of male and female protagonists. The following graph
shows their findings.
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The researchers found that although
the proportion of female
protagonists has increased over this
60-year period, male protagonists
remain overrepresented even in
recent years.

Other findings include:

* Non-human characters are

overrepresented as male, but only
in fiction books.

* Human characters are also

overrepresented as male in non-
fiction books.

* Male authors showed

improvement in the male-to-female
ratio of central characters across
the 60-year period, but this was
limited to books targeted to younger
children.

* Female authors continue to

overrepresent males in books with
non-human characters

The researchers noted that their study shares a common limitation of such research - their analyses do not
reflect actual reading rates. In other words, they analyzed children’s books to estimate general trends in
gender roles, but they did not measure the popularity of the books and the frequency that they are read by
various age groups.

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