Natural Experiments, Impact on Gender Roles

Effects of TV on Gender-Role Attitudes

The Notel, Unitel, Multitel Study by Tannis MacBeth and colleagues allowed for the isolation of the effects of televised portrayals of gender from other sources of gender-related messages by studying gender-role attitudes in three Canadian towns (given the pseudonyms Notel, Unitel, and Multitel) before and 2 years after TV was introduced in Notel. Although their communications profiles were different, the three towns were similar in size (about 700), demographic variables such as socioeconomic status (SES), the cultural backgrounds of the residents, and the types of industry in the area. This natural experiment compared the gender-role attitudes of Notel children with those of children in Unitel and Multitel.

In one segment of a wide-ranging natural experiment, Meredith Kimball (1986) focused on children's gender-role attitudes. She used the Sex-Role Differentiation Scale (SRD) to assess students' beliefs about the appropriate and typical behaviors of girls and boys [Page 621]“your own age” (Peer Scale). The students also were asked to rate how frequently their own mother and father performed certain tasks (Parent Scale).

For the Peer scale, students rated each item on a scale from 1 (not true) to 7 (very true). There were 61 items spread across five subscales: traits (e.g., tough, hardworking), behaviors (e.g., do dishes, swear), job suitability when grown up (e.g., bus driver, clerk in a store, a judge), authority relations (e.g., do what their parents say), and peer relations (e.g., keep secrets their friends tell them). For each item, the child rated how typical that behavior, characteristic, or future suitability of a job was both for boys their own age and for girls their own age. Their score was the sum of the differences between the two gender ratings for all 61 items. This scale measures degree of sex typing, that is, the extent to which the child differentiated between male and female peers by gender-typing them. The data were checked for the possibility that a child would differentiate or gender-type in a nontraditional way, for example, rating girls their age higher than boys their age on “tough,” but this never occurred.

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