EXCEED THE SPACE PROVIDED. This study extends knowledge about gender development in two ways: (1) by adding 3 or 4 annual waves of adolescent data to a 5 year longitudinal study of gender development in middle childhood that originally focused on 2 siblings and their mothers and fathers in approximately 190 two-parent, European-American, working and middle class families; and (2) by significantly expanding the sample in adolescence to include 180 two-parent, African-American, working and middle class families similar in terms of parents' education and employment and adolescents' sex and ages to the families in the original study, as well as 80 European-American families with similar characteristics, from the same geographic regions. This significantexpansion of the study's scope responds to the call in developmental science for research to move beyond an exclusive focus on risk and pathology in African-American youth and families to study normative developmental processes and family dynamics. The original study followed firstborns from ages 10-14 years and their younger siblings from ages 8-12years. This study follows firstborns from 15-18 and their younger siblings from 13-16. The design involves collecting data from two siblings in each family, an approach that permits both betweenfamily comparisons of the gender-typed attributes and experiences of girls versus boys (includingtheir antecedents and consequences), andwithin-family comparisons of sisters versus brothers as a function of family context (i.e., parents' traditionality in work and family roles and gender role attitudes). Data collection at each wave involves: (1) home interviews with mothers and fathers and with older and younger adolescent siblings; these interviews focus on family roles and relation- ships, gender-typed attributes and values, and psychological functioning;and, (2) a series of seven evening telephone interviews in which family members report on the activities they engaged in that day (e.g., feminine versus masculine household chores; 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 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 nonshared environment for siblings; a cultural- ecological model provides a framework for our study of gender socialization and development in African-American and European-American families. PERFORMANCE SITE ========================================Section End===========================================
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