Research Study Reveals Stories Created by Children are More Likely to Have Male Personalities

A trio of researchers at the College of Oxford has discovered that in stories by kids of either sex, male characters appear more frequently than women personalities. In their paper published in the journal Culture for Research study in Child Growth, Yaling Hsiao, Nilanjana Banerji, and Kate Country explain their analysis of narratives created by hundreds of British youngsters for a BBC tale composing competition.

The job started as the researchers asked themselves whether sex contributes to how children compose stories. They acquired electronic duplicates of the stories written by youngsters for the BBC contest and examined them to find trends. To determine if one sex was more or less likely to appear in the youngster’s tales, the researchers scanned more than 100,000 stories using software to count personality names. Especially, they initially utilized cross-referenced terms in birth registries for England and Wales to determine which characters were utilized for males and women. Words were defined as traditionally male or female if 60% of those noted in the windows registries were provided to a kid or a lady.

They discovered that both children and girls tend to compose mainly concerning male personalities, but there were some distinctions. Youthful boys featured males in their stories roughly 75% of the moment and kept close to that standard as they aged. Young girls did the same approximately 70% of the time, however, points altered as they got older– female characters began showing up more frequently. By the time they reached age 13, the percent of man to female personalities had gone down to 50%.

To learn why male characters appeared in youngsters’ stories more often than women, the scientists also carried out a search and evaluation of characters showing up in publications written by adults for kids from 1813 to the present. In so doing, they discovered that just 38% of the characters in them were female-as well as it was not due to the unnecessary influence of older publications. Modern publications created for youngsters still feature mostly male characters.

Reference: Yaling Hsiao et al, Boys Write About Boys: Androcentrism in Children’s Reading Experience and Its Emergence in Children’s Own Writing, Child Development (2021). DOI: 10.1111/cdev.13623