Abstract
This paper is concerned with the investigation of the cognitive structure involving its developmental aspects of sex roles in adolescence mainly through factor analytic techniques.
We primarily applied factor analysis with rotation of factors to the experimental data which appeared in the author's previous work (1967) based on questionnaire approach. With the role of men, we obtained two salient factors which could be referred to as “intelligence” and “activeness”. And, with the one of women, we had only one factor which suggested “submissiveness with elegance”.
Secondly, the factor scores were obtained in each factor dimension and we compared them among the given samples. And, we found the largest difference in the factor of “activeness” and the the smallest was found in “submissiveness with elegance”.
Thirdly, we investigated the developmental changes of the cognitive structure through the analytic technique in terms of the weibull distribution (cf. Kashiwagi and Azuma: 1971). As a result, significant trend with the change of ages was found in the factor of “intelligence” (the most typical result was appeared in the boy's group).
The remaining results to be noticed were as fol lows.
Older boys made the clear discrimination between the expected male role and the female one, and they put stress on the importance of the factors “intelligence” and “activeness” in the male role and on the contrary they did stress the importance of the factor “submissiveness with elegance” in the female one. And, although girls also had a similar kind of cognitive structure, they did not always have the unambiguity in the last factor. The finding above seemed to suggest that some older girls would resist taking the conventional view relating to the factor of “submissiveness with elegance”, and they felt more or less frustrated to accept the view concerning the specific role of women by themselves.
