Department of Psychological Science
University of Mary Washington
Mercer Hall
1301 College Avenue
Fredericksburg, Virginia 22401
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Contact Dr. Mindy Erchull: merchull@umw.edu
Very interesting! Could you tell me a little bit more about the content of the vignettes you included?
We chose to write the vignettes to reflect “a day in the life of ___” and main character would either be Jane as a stay-at-home mother or the breadwinner mother, and John as either the stay-at-home father or breadwinner father to reflect either traditional or non-traditional gender roles. The gender role of the parent in the vignette was presented in a way to show how a day in the life of one parent is while the other parent is either at home or at work.
Interesting research idea! On some level, I am surprised by the lack of significant results, but I also wonder if that is related to the sample. That can sometimes be the easiest way out of explaining results away and you mention a limited age range, but I think experience might also matter here. People are notoriously bad at predicting how they will behave. Given that few (if any) of your sample are currently parents themselves, that may have impacted the kind of relation they were able to make with characters in the vignettes. They may “think” they would parent a certain way, but not having the experience yet, matters. What do you all think about that possibility?
We purposely chose the Emerging Adult population for that specific reason; this population is likely to not have children, or are simply thinking of when they will have kids. Although there is still that small sample size of Emerging Adults that do have children – we had 4 participants that were parents.
We purposely chose this age range because since they are transitioning out of dependency on their parents and childhood and have not yet entered the independence of adulthood, and the fact that they are typically the most accepting of more modern social constructs a more ‘egalitarian’ family structures. This is also the age range where there is more exploration of the self, identity, worldviews, and ideas of what they want for their own lives. Hope this answers your question!
Hi,
Great job on this presentation! It was interesting to learn about societal pressures influence gender roles. Your previous literature on parenting styles and gender roles where great and helped me better understand the reasoning for your hypothesis. I was surprised that your results for your hypothesis where not significant. Do you think that drawing from an older age sample that has a larger parent populaton (ex: 25-35 year olds) would influence your results?
Thank you so much!
We do believe that if we had a wider age range (i.e. including older generations), that the results would have been drastically different just because this is an age range where people are typically not parents, but are thinking of what parenting styles they would like to adopt if they were to even have children. As well as a greater ability to generalize to the general population.
This was a very fascinating research topic! I’m very shocked that your research did not support your hypotheses. I wonder to what extent the limited age range had on your results. I’m also interested in the concept of taking this research outside of the gender binary, and how different the results may be. Thank you for sharing!
Thank you! We believe that if we had a broader age range we would have completely different results for the likelihood of older generations already having practice being parents and have adopted the own parenting styles.
This was a really interesting study! It was very informative to learn about the existing research on gender and parenting styles. I wonder how different your results would be on different demographics, such as an older population.
Thank you! As stated in other comments, we believe that the results would have noticeably different had we included older generations in our study due to the fact that they typically already have experience as parents.
In addition, admittingly it would have been interesting for us to identify a difference between the perception of parenting styles based on the different age brackets had we included individuals aged 26+. Certainly, this research was heavily based on a convenience sample. Thank you for responding to our presentation!
Hi! I really liked this study and found it interesting to see the comparison between gender roles and parenting styles. I thought that the inclusion of the vignettes into the study was an engaging way to collect data from the participants. Also, thank you for explaining it more in-depth in the comments above!
Thank you, Sydney! The way the variables were operationalized was inspired by other articles within gender studies. Compiling the right mix was a hurdle and although the results were not significant, just as the presentation states the limitations were believed to be coming from elsewhere. Thank you for taking the time to comment above!
Great idea for a research topic! I was surprised for the lack of significant results. I would guess that this is due to the limited sample size and the area we are in. Even though we are technically in a city we are not in a major city that is very progressive and open to new things. If a sample was takin in somewhere like LA I would guess that the results would be very different.
Fascinating topic! I enjoyed your original hypotheses and your discussion at the end about how times are continuously changing. If this study is re-done in a few years, more housing and parenting options would be explored versus just traditional ones?