Parental influence and sibling gender on children's household task performance

¶ … 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)

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.

The results of the study found that children in the 8-12 age range almost always perform gender related tasks in the home. In terms of family context, the study found that the gender of the child had a major impact upon the type of work that was done. Researchers found that the girls performed most of the work in feminine tasks areas, while boys did most of the work in masculine task areas. (Antill et al., 1996) The study also found that there was little evidence to support the assertion that first born children do more work than second born children. (Antill et al., 1996) The study concluded that parental encouragement was effective with feminine tasks. They also found that parental involvement and parental egalitarianism created the performance of negative masculine tasks. (Antill et al., 1996)