Martin and Halverson Study (socio, development, cog)

Question 1

Aim

Answer 1

To investigate if schemes about gender-consistent activities can result in memory distortion in children

Question 2

Procedure

Answer 2

• Sample: approx 50 5-6 year old white middle-class children
• Children’s level of stereotyping accessed through asking about their preference for activities
• Day one: learning pictures
  
  • 16 pictures half gender-conforming (eg. boy playing with train), half not (eg. woman chopping wood)
  • Presented one at a time, child told to state if person was a man, woman, boy or girl (mistakes were
    corrected immediately)
  • child also asked how much they were “like” the person using blocks
• Day two (one week later): Testing memory
  
  • Children asked about all the activities they had previously seen plus 8 additional activities
    - Questioned: “Do you remember seeing a picture of someone [insert activity] in the pictures I showed
    you last week?” -if they said yes, they were asked to point to a block that showed their confidence
  • Next asked if they remember seeing a girl, boy, man or woman performing the activity -blocks were
    used again to rate response

Question 3

Findings

Answer 3

• Children tended to change gender-inconsistent information into gender-consistent information by changing
  the actor -no correlation between level of stereotyping and memory distortion
• Children were just as confident in their distorted memories as in their gender-consistent memories
• Some children made mistakes in the first stage, showing that stereotypes might also influence encoding
• Supports the idea that stereotypes can create memory distortion in children

Question 4

Strengths

Answer 4

• Eight lines drawings were included at recall that
  tey hadn’t seen to ensure that kids weren’t just
  saying “yes” to every question

Question 5

Limitations

Answer 5

• Could be participant bias instead of memory
  distortion (perhaps just guess using schema)
• May only occur with time delay (one week)
• Temporal validity

Question 6

Ethical Considerations

Answer 6

• Informed consent (parents would need to provide
  consent on behalf of the children)

Question 7

Research method

Answer 7

• Experiment