AO3

• Support for parental influence

  • Smith and Lloyd showed that mother's do treat boy and girl babies differently, in line with sex-role stereotypes
• Limitation validity of BSRI

  • It lacks temporal validity it is historically and socially biased. Definitions of masculinity and femininity were created over 40 years ago! Hoffmann and Borders asked a group of 400 undergraduates to consider the definitions from Bems original study
  • They only kept two of the original definitions! They failed to secure 75% agreement on definitions so BEM scale may no longer be relevant! Today we have non binary, metrosexual, ladettes etc..all do not fit definition.
• Smith and Lloyd (1978)

  • The mothers (sample size 32) were videotaped playing for 10 minutes with a baby (not their own child). The baby was six months old and dressed and named as a boy or a girl (the clothes/ names were not always consistent with sex), Seven toys were present: two stereotypically masculine, two feminine and three neutral. If a mother thought she was playing with a boy, she verbally encouraged more motor activity and offered gender-appropriate toys.
  • In other words, mothers responded to the perceived sex of the infant, in line with typical gender expectations.
• Reliability of the BSRI A strength of the BSRI is its high reliability.

  • Research has demonstrated high test-retest reliability for the BSRI over a four-week period, correlations range from .76 to .94 (Bem, 1981). A short form of the scale has been developed using just 30 items and has a good correlation of 90 with the original. Having a shorter form improved the internal reliability of the test because the less socially desirable terms were removed, such as 'gulible' and 'childlike".
  • High reliability is vital for any test to produce meaningful results.