Kimball Flashcards
what can Kimball be used for
Social Cognitive Theory
aim of kimball
Kimball (1986) carried out a natural experiment, taking advantage of the introduction of television in a remote area of Canada. She wanted to see if exposure to “normal television viewing” would lead to a change in the level of gender stereotyping in a Northern Canadian community.
sample of Kimball
The participants were 536 children in four different communities. The sample consisted of 130 children from Notel (that is, No Television), 135 from Unitel (one station), 166 from Multitel (more than one station), and 105 from Vancouver.
Both Unitel and Multitel were from the same geographic region. Vancouver was used as a control.
procedure of Kimball (1)
The children’s level of gender stereotyping was measured using the Sex Role Differentiation (SRD) scale. The SRD asks children to rate how appropriate or frequent certain behaviors are for boys and girls their own age, as well as how often their mothers or fathers perform certain tasks.
procedure of Kimball (2)
The SRD was administered to all students in grades 6 and 9 in each of the three towns both before and 2 years after television was introduced to Notel. The control group’s data was obtained from a previous study that was carried out 8 months before this study began.
procedure of Kimball (3)
The children filled in the questionnaire during normal class time. Since information about the children’s parents was requested, the responses were anonymous.
results of Kimball (1)
Before their town had television, Notel children held more egalitarian gender attitudes than children who viewed television regularly. Girls had lower levels of gender stereotyping than boys at the beginning of the study.
results of Kimball (2)
Two years after Notel obtained television, gender stereotyping had significantly increased in both the NOTEL boys and girls. In Phase 2, there was no significant difference between the gender stereotyping scores among the boys in the three towns. When looking more carefully at the subscales on the SRD, the Notel boys’ stereotypes with regard to gender and jobs had increased significantly.
The study supports that the introduction of television increased levels of gender stereotyping.
evaluation of Kimball (1)
The study is a natural experiment, so ecological validity is high. However, since the researcher did not manipulate the independent variable, participants were not randomly allocated to conditions, and there was no ability to control for extraneous variables, the study has low internal validity and causality cannot be determined.
evaluation of Kimball (2)
The study is quite dated, so it is difficult to determine the study’s temporal validity - that is, whether the findings can be generalized to modern society.
evaluation of Kimball (3)
Since the data were anonymous, this means that the researchers did not compare data from Phase 1 and Phase 2 for specific children. Instead, the study is cross-sectional. The researchers could not see changes in the gender stereotypes of individual children over time.
