Gender Socialization in Mexican American Families

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DESCRIPTION (investigator's abstract): This study examines gender socialization processes in Mexican American families with adolescent offspring. We respond to the call of developmental scholars to move beyond an exclusive focus on risk and pathology in ethnic minority families to study normative developmental processes and family dynamics. Our goals are to investigate how parents' cultural values and practices are linked to their gender socialization activities, and in turn, to their daughters' and sons' sex-typed personal qualities and psychosocial functioning. We propose to study adolescent sibling pairs, mothers, and fathers in 240 Mexican American families. We will target seventh and eighth graders (ages 12-14 years) and their siblings who are between one and three years older and also living at home. Collecting data from two siblings in each family permits both between-family comparisons of the gender-typed attributes and experiences of girls versus boys and within-family comparisons of sisters versus brothers; we will explore how sex and sibling differences are linked to fathers', mothers', and interparental differences in ethnic and gender role orientations. Data collection involves: (1) home interviews with mothers and fathers and with older and younger adolescents which focus on cultural experiences, family roles and relationships, gender-typed attributes and values, and psychosocial functioning; and (2) a series of 7 evening telephone interviews in which family members report on the activities they engaged in that clay (e.g., feminine versus masculine housework; time spent with mother versus father) and answer questions designed to assess the accuracy of parents' knowledge about their offspring's experiences. Hypotheses about the connections between culture, family socialization experiences and the development of gender-typed attributes, relationships, and values, as well as youth psychosocial functioning, are drawn from social learning theory, a person- environment fit model, feminist sociology and developmental research on the family as a non-shared environment for siblings; a cultural ecological model provides a framework for our study of gender socialization in Mexican American families.