A child’s sex and age as predictors of the total time spent engaging in sex-specific toy play

Type :

Research papers

Pages :

14 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

07/07/2008

Category :

Philosophy & literature

Sub category :

Humanities/philosophy

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Summary :

Abstract.
Method.
Materials.
Procedure.
Results.
Discussion.

Abstract

This naturalistic observational study examined the effect of a child's sex and age with regard to how long comparatively that child is likely to engage in the three established categories of sex-specific toy play: male sex-specific toy play, female sex-specific toy play, and neutral toy play. Ten male and ten female subjects of ages ranging from 21.5 to 38 months were observed for ten minutes each during the free-play period, being coded for the total time they spent engaged in the various categories of toy play. Various ANOVAs, pairwise comparisons, and paired sample t-tests were then conducted, revealing the most significant result to be that age significantly predicts the total time a child is likely to engage in male sex-specific toy play. More specifically, younger children are more likely to spend more time engaged in male sex-specific toy play than older children, and, even further, younger male subjects are more likely to spend significantly more time in male sex-specific play than older male subjects. Additionally, the results found that overall sex is a marginally significant predictor of the total amount of time boys and girls are likely to spend in male sex-specific toy play.