CHILDRENS GENDER-RELATED SELF-PERCEPTIONS, ACTIVITY PREFERENCES, AND OCCUPATIONAL STEREOTYPES - A TEST OF 3 MODELS OF GENDER CONSTRUCTS

Fourth through sixth grade boys (n = 197) and girls (n = 271) were giv en a simplified form of the Personal Attributes Questionnaire [J. T Sp ence and R. L. Helmreich (1978b) The Intermediate Personal Attributes Questionnaire: A Simplified Version for Children and Adults, unpublish ed manuscript Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin] , assessing desirable instrumental and expressive traits; subsets of i tems from J. P. Boldizar's [(1991) ''Assessing Sex Typing and Androgyn y in Children: The Children's Sex Role Inventory,'' Developmental Psyc hology, Vol. 27, pp. 505-513] children's version of the Bem Sex Role I nventory [S. L. Bem (1974) ''The Measurement of Psychological Androgyn y, '' Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Vol 42, 155-162]; S. L. Harter's [(1985) Manual for the Self-Perception Profile for Chi ldren, Denver: University of Denver] measures of self-esteem; and meas ures of masculine and feminine activity preferences and prescriptive o ccupational stereotypes. The children were predominantly white and fro m middle-class backgrounds. The correlations among the gender-related measures were more congruent with a multifactorial approach to gender than the unifactorial gender schema model or the two-factor model of m asculinity and femininity. Instrumentality, however, was correlated wi th self-esteem in both genders, a finding most reasonably interpreted in terms of this personality variable per se.