¶ … Parents and Family Context on Children's Involvement in Household Tasks" discusses the results of a study conducted with hundreds of families living in Sydney, Australia. The reason for the study was to examine how household tasks are influenced by parents, family context, and the combined impact of family context and parental influences. Through this study the researcher intended to demonstrate that children would most often perform gender related tasks in the home. In addition, the researchers intended to demonstrate that,
Children with an opposite-gender sibling would do fewer opposite-gender tasks but more same-gender tasks when compared to children with a same-gender sibling... Parental encouragement of both masculine and feminine household tasks would result in increased child performance of those tasks... The gender of the child would be the most influential of the family context variables on the performance of gender-linked household tasks." (Antill et al., 1996)
Participants
The sample group was composed of 191 Anglo Saxon couples and their 382 children; only the two oldest children in each family participated in the study. The group consisted of 189 girls and 193 boys. (Antill et al., 1996)
The mean ages of the fathers and mothers were 39 and 36.7 respectively. (Antill et al., 1996)
Sixty-seven percent of the participants...
(Antill et al., 1996) The participants were selected based on several criteria. Firstly, both children studied had to be in the 8-12 age range to participate in the study. (Antill et al., 1996) Secondly, they were also selected based on the sibling gender pattern; researchers wanted an equal number of patterns represented. (Antill et al., 1996)
In addition, researchers wanted participants to be from diverse socio-economic backgrounds. The sample sizes were adequate and were composed of people from three socio-economic backgrounds; high, middle, and low. (Antill et al., 1996)
Procedure
In the procedural aspect of the study, children were interviewed to find out the type of tasks that they performed in the home. Parents had to fill out questionnaires concerning parental performance of work performed in the home, parental encouragement and egalitarian. (Antill et al., 1996)
Researchers asked parents to complete the questionnaires separately before their children were interviewed. (Antill et al., 1996)
At the time of the interview, the questionnaires were collected and parents had a chance to clarify any answers that were unclear. (Antill et al., 1996)
The measurements were based on several…
