Example research essay topic: Gender Roles Gender Identity - 1,062 words

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Gender Roles Which has more influence over a child's understanding of gender roles, the child's parent or the mass media? To answer this question, we need to conduct an experiment using all modern scientific psychological methods. However, these experiments demand time; therefore, here we will use the scientific researches conducted by others. We presume that this work will be useful both for parents and for everybody else who is interested in forming of a childs gender role. First, let us define what is gender role.

This is a psychological term. Sociologists and sexologists use the term gender role to name the behaviors and responsibilities prescribed for each gender by a society. A person's gender role comprises all the things a person does to express their gender identity. A person's gender role can be expressed through clothing, behaviour, choice of work, personal relationships, and other factors. For example, one such male gender role could include wearing male clothing (such as trousers, a tie, and a suit), going to the pub occasionally, drinking beer and playing darts with his friends, swearing if he hurts himself, seeking heterosexual relationships, seeking or maintaining an executive job, and so on. Female gender role is different from males one: girls wear dresses, use cosmetics etc.

Considerable debate exists as to whether gender roles are biological in origin, in the sense of the behavioral traits arising primarily from the biology of sex; or culturally created, in the sense of behavioral traits arising from early socialization. For example, within a certain society, one's gender role often conforms to that society's social norms. Behaviour that does not conform to these norms is often discouraged. As with many such debates, most researchers believe that both factors influence the development and propagation of gender roles. However, the relative influence of each, and the specifics of how that influence operates, are still hotly disputed. In our question, parents are partly a biological factor and partly a social one.

The mass media is certainly a social factor. Biological influence of parents is their genes (XX or XY chromosome combination). All other things that parents do for their children, their upbringing is a social factor. Therefore, biological factor plays a minor role in our research. And to prove this point of view we will address the book of Iain Banks Wasp Factory. In this book, the narrator is a boy who hates girls and thinks that only men are strong and worth living.

He does all the things boys do: he fights, goes to the pub, he hunts and kills. In fact, he is a murderer for he kills not only animals but also people. His parent, father, brought him up as a boy. But the truth is that this boy is really a girl. His father lied to her and to all others and she believed that she is a boy. In the end, when she finds out the truth she decides to kill herself.

However, this example is a fiction. Nevertheless, it shows that parents mean much in forming a childs gender role. The mass media in our modern world in most cases is television. In society today the television set, which is so prominent in so many households, is not only a means of entertainment, but is also an important source of information.

With recent research indicating that, on average, children spend 3. 3 hours a day in front of the television, it seems inevitable that, as a learning source, it has an important role in helping the 'vulnerable and impressionable' minds of children to develop certain social roles and behavior traits. Television presents to its attentive audience a certain image of the world, providing a framework for what is acceptable and what is unacceptable in society, and also sends out implicit and explicit messages of what the world is like. In its portrayal of 'normal' life, it reflects many important social roles, one of the most important and pervasive of these being 'gender'. Television has the potential to teach children about how men and women act in society, and to mould their views of what is expected of them in society as either a man or a woman.

Television... can play a significant role in a child's growing beliefs and attitudes about what it means to be male or female in the world. (Van Evra, 1990, page 112) Television still adheres to sex-role stereotypes presenting women as dependent, emotional, domestic caregivers, while men are the supporting 'bread winners'. Depicting a society in this way has disturbing implications of what kind of world children believe they are living in. Portraying the sexes in dated and 'traditional' roles can not only influence a child's choice of toys or clothes, but more importantly than that, television can strongly influence what opportunities children see for future work and what sense of self respect and pride they have. There is much evidence to support the theory, which indicates that children accept the roles they see portrayed on the screen as the norm. However, parents, father and mother, may exclude television from their homes.

Then the possibility that the child will form his gender role on the example of his parents is much bigger. Parents can dress their son in girls clothes and then the child will act more like a girl. There are many examples when a child lives with his mother without a father and he has more female features (sensitiveness, shyness, etc). The conclusion we make is that both the mass media and parents influence a childs understanding of gender roles. Television is a very powerful source of forming a childs gender role.

That is why parents must pay much attention as to what programs their children watch and think how their content may influence their children. Therefore, parents stay the most important factor in molding their childrens gender roles. They are able to fully control this process and to bring up their children the way they want. Works Cited Beasley, Elena. Children, Television and Gender Roles. A critical review of the available evidence concerning what influence television may have on the development of children's understanding of gender roles and of their own gender identity. 15 May 2004 < web >.

Gender Role. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 15 May 2004 < web >. Van Evra, Judith (1990): Television and Child Development. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum

Research essay sample on Gender Roles Gender Identity