Abstract
This paper concerns an investigation of cognitive processes in sex-role learning, an important aspect of personality development and social development.
In particular, from the developmental point of view, we were concerned with differences between boys and girls in manner of perceiving and evaluating male and female roles in social life.
A questionnaire consists of thirty-four semantic differential bipolar adjective type items mainly concerning sex-role.Subjects were required to indicate for each item its desirability for persons of each sex.In other words, they gave two responses to each item.Subjects consisted of middle school, high school, and university male and female Japanese students (thirteen to twenty-one years old).Some similar results were found among all age and sex groups.However, there appeared some quite different results concerning the cognitive processes when we made comparisons among the groups.
The major findings were as follows:
1.The characteristics of the male role were generally perceived to be more well-defined than those of female role and the characteristics of the former were regarded to be more socially desirable than the latter.Especially, younger age groups demonstrated less well-defined judgement regarding the female role.
2.Younger male groups also defined sex-role ambiguously, and older male groups judged sex-role more definitely.
3.Compared to male groups, both younger and older female groups judged the sex-role definitely.
4.In older female groups the characteristics of the female role were perceived to be well-defined. And younger female groups used different criteria in differentiating the male role from the female one. than older female groups did.
Finally we discussed several further problems relating to the present study and we proposed some possible strategies to them.
