Imagine that you use the naturalistic observation research method to study gende
ID: 3447094 • Letter: I
Question
Imagine that you use the naturalistic observation research method to study gender differences in social behavior. For this purpose, you request permission from 16 mothers, who have children in the first-grade, to observe their interactions with their children for an hour at home. There are eight boys and eight girls in this group. You notice that eight mothers, who have a daughter each, are more likely to initiate topics concerning their daughters' relationships and feelings-for example, the daughters' relationships with their best friends or neighbors and feelings about their relationships or school work. On the other hand, seven of the eight mothers, who have a son each, are more likely to initiate topics that concerned the boys' activities with others-for example, games played with friends or neighbors-and their accomplishments in school and sports. Only one mother of a son initiated conversation that addressed his feelings, specifically feelings about losing a soccer game. Intrigued with your findings, you set out to explain these gender differences and plan to write-up your results:Explanation / Answer
This gender difference between girls and boys is largely due to the parental involvement. In the growing years,parents actually speak differently to boys and girls. Moreover,mothers talk more to their daughters and fathers with their sons. Mothers tend to use more emotional laden language but mostly with their daughters than sons. Fathers on the other hand use a more instrumental approach towards their sons. The theory is that mothers may be more comfortable talking about their emotions than fathers. Children might therefore think it is more appropriate for girls to talk about feelings. In fact, daughters were more likely than sons to speak about their emotions with their fathers when talking about past experiences. Emotional intelligence is not an innate quality of females.The fact that parents talk in more emotional terms to daughters over sons can’t be explained away by saying parents do this because they believe girls understand emotions better. Most parents say they want boys to be more expressive, but don’t know they are speaking differently to them and even about them like in the above case except for one mother who clearly understands the importance of emotions and relationships to be inculcated in the same manner in her son as well. Parents should try to teach boys about emotion as much as possible and use emotion-laden language with both sons and daughters.We are beyond the point in society where boys are taught never to express emotions. Parents need to model for them how to appropriately express emotions. These are learned stereotypes and parents are reinforcing them as a society.