Introduction to Gender Social Learning Theory Content Analysis

What is gender? On mini-whiteboards, write down what you think the term ‘gender’ refers to Sex refers to the person’s biological status as either being male of female, whereas gender refers to the individual’s sense of being male or female and the possession of behavioural and personality characteristics that are assigned to a particular gender

Where does gender come from? On mini-whiteboards, write down where you think somebody’s sense of gender comes from. In other words, what makes someone feel male/female, and, in some cases, behave in a traditional male/female way?

Social Learning Theory Social learning theory is one way in which psychologist try to explain gender Put simply, the social learning theory suggests that gender is a result of what we observe in the environment. Children learn their gender from what they see Key terms associated with social learning theory On your worksheet, see if you can match the key term to the right definition by drawing a line to join them

Social Learning Theory: Key terms Here are the answers to the matching activity. Write the correct term next to each definition on your sheet and give your self a tick if you got it right Observation The child pays attention to the behaviour Identification The child wants to be like the model and so is motivated to imitate their behaviour Vicarious reinforcement The child sees the model being rewarded for their behaviour, which makes imitation of the behaviour more likely Direct reinforcement The child is rewarded for the imitated behaviour

Social Learning Theory: Key terms Here are the answers to the matching activity. Write the correct term next to each definition on your sheet and give your self a tick if you got it right Differential reinforcement Children are rewarded for behaviours which are consistent with society’s gender stereotypes, and therefore the type of behaviour that is rewarded differs for boys and girls Motor reproduction The child imitates the behaviour they have observed Role Model Somebody the child looks up to Retention The child remembers what they have seen How many did you get right?

Applying Social Learning Theory You are now going to use the key terms sheet to identify aspects of social learning theory that are being demonstrated in the following example In pairs, discuss and write down which part of the scenario relates to each specific part of SLT After you have had a chance to do that, individual members of the class will be selected to come up to the board and identify where a terms occurs in the example

Nisha’s experience

Evaluating the Social Learning Theory of Gender Whenever we look at a theory we will need to decide how good it is as an explanation of that behaviour This will involve considering its strengths and weaknesses. We will discuss this in much more detail later on, but for now, on mini-whiteboards, see if you can come up with: A way in which what we have learned from this theory could be used to benefit children (a strength) An alternative way of explaining why boys and girls behave differently (a weakness)

Content Analysis A psychologist is interested in looking at the way toys are presented to children in adverts. She believes that gender stereotyping in toy adverts could be responsible for the toys that children choose to play with, and subsequently the type of roles they go on to perform in adulthood She has compiled a selection of toy adverts and wants to conduct a content analysis on them You are going to help. But first you need to know what a content analysis is…

Content Analysis Content analysis is a way of converting qualitative data (words) into quantitative data (numbers). This will allow to perform a statistical analysis on our findings Firstly we need to select the materials to be used for the analysis – this will be the selection of adverts that have been chosen for you on the next slide Then we need to compile a coding system to use on the data. This is a set of categories that we will be looking for examples of in the selected material. For example, ‘boy playing with action figure’. We will be aiming to come up with 6-8 categories The way we will do this is to watch the adverts first to get an idea of categories that we might use. Remember we are looking for gender stereotypes in toy marketing, so it would be useful if you have a category that relates to boys, you have a corresponding category that relates to girls, so that we can make a comparison, e.g., for the example given in point 3, you would also include the category ‘girl playing with action figure’ Let’s watch the ads…

Toy Adverts

Content Analysis Now draw a grid that looks like this: Decide on your categories and write them into the left-hand side of the grid We will now watch the adverts again. This time, every time you witness one of your categories, put a tick in the grid next to that category

Toy Adverts

Content Analysis We have now converted our qualitative data into quantitative data (words into numbers), because we can count up the number of ticks in each category So now you need to add up and write a total for each category Now see if you can write down three interesting findings from your data..

What do you remember? Now, without any notes, we are going to see what you remember about social learning theory, gender and content analysis by playing Quizlet..