Negotiation and gender divide

¶ … 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 were born in Australia, 19% were from other English speaking countries while 14% were from non-English speaking countries. (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 scales. The first of which was the Children's Masculine and Feminine Task Scales. This measurement questioned the children about how often they competed or helped with 18 different tasks in the home. There were six different ways that the children could answer; "(1) never, (2) about once a month or less, (3) 2-3 times a month, (4) about once a week, (5) 2-3 times a week, (6) once a day or more." (Antill et al., 1996)

Researchers also used the parents' encouragement scales for masculine and feminine tasks. This scale assesses parents encouragement of the 18 different tasks performed in the home. In this measurement there were five ways that parents could respond; "1) strongly discourage, (2) discourage to some extent, (3) neither encourage or discourage, (4) encourage to some extent, (5) strongly encourage. The scales were formed by taking the means of the same sets of items that formed the children's masculine and feminine task scales." (Antill et al., 1996)

Researchers also used an attitude towards women scale. This scale measured whether or not parents' views about women were egalitarian or traditional. (Antill et al., 1996) The scale was created by Spence, Helmreich, and Stapp. When participants score high it reflects an egalitarian attitude and a low score reflects a traditional point-of-view. (Antill et al., 1996)

Results and Discussion

The study had three different sections of results. These three sections include the family context, parental influence and the Combined Impact of Family Context and Parental Variables. Researchers performed a series of 8 paired t-tests and 16 independent-groups t-tests to collect data.