The exploration of gender references in children's books

Level of Education of Students Involved

Undergraduate

Faculty Sponsor

Abbie Thompson

Streaming Media

 
Media is loading

College

Arts and Sciences

Discipline(s)

Developmental Psychology

ORCID Identifier(s)

N/A

Presentation Type

Poster Presentation

Symposium Date

Spring 4-25-2024

Abstract

Books are a key aspect of children’s world. The American Academy of Pediatrics (2021) recommends that children should be read to every day beginning at birth. While books are important, we know fairly little about the content of books, especially the language presented in them. We know that books are one area where children are exposed to different concepts and ideas and they transfer the information they learn from books into real-world contexts (Strouse et al., 2018). In many languages, like English, there is often the male as-norm perspective where many generic forms of words are masculine in nature. Due to this, there is an increase in gender stereotypes, inequalities, and misattributions (Vainapel et al., 2015). Therefore we predict that males will be represented more in the language of the books than females.

The top 100 picture books from two Indiana counties (N=200), based on circulation data from the county libraries, will be assessed. We have already received the data on the top children’s books from both counties and have been transcribing the books. We will use the program LIWC to analyze the transcripts for male and female references. LIWC is a widely used text analysis tool.

We hypothesize there will be significantly more male references compared to female references in children’s picture books. We will use paired samples t-tests to see if this hypothesis is supported. Frequency and descriptive statistics will be used to understand the amount of male and female references in the picture books.

Biographical Information about Author(s)

Authors: Natalie Ensor, Emily Gibson, Kamila Wolowiec, Grace Kostoff, Meghan McCann, Katherine Naylor, Ana Bozinovski, Isabella Pressler

The eight research assistants range from sophomores to seniors, with majors in Psychology, Social Work, and Nursing. The members are interested in the Learning and Language Acquisition lab, specifically related to children’s language development and the gender references used within children’s books.

This work was completed in collaboration with the Language Acquisition and Learning Lab under the supervision of Dr. Abbie Thompson, Assistant professor of psychology.

For Artistic Presentations

N/A

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS