Despite wide-spread legislative and social change, the contemporary workplace remains a difficult environment for those performing non-traditional occupational roles (e.g., female pilots, male nurses). The current thesis sought to explore stereotype activation and application for such individuals in both adults and children. Using a set of standardised stimuli depicting males and females performing both traditional and non-traditional jobs, the first set of experiments explored the activation of sex-role stereotypes in adults. Results indicated that for both Experiment 1 (i.e., sex-categorisation task) and Experiment 2 (i.e., name-categorisation task) participants were slower to respond when the stimuli depicted an individual performing a stereotype-incongruent occupation, suggesting that occupational stereotypes were automatically activated. Experiments 3 and 4 explored the evaluative nature of such stereotypes using the Implicit-Association Test (IAT) and the Single-Category Implicit-Association Test (SC-IAT), respectively. The IAT results demonstrated that participants exhibited stronger stereotypic-positive/counter-stereotypic-negative associations compared to when these mappings were reversed. Moreover, a follow-up SC-IAT revealed a specific association between counter-stereotypical occupations and negativity, an effect that was stronger for male than female targets. Finally, Experiments 5-8 investigated stereotype activation and application in children. Interestingly, results from these studies were comparable to those of the adult findings, namely children automatically activated occupational stereotypes and showed an evaluative preference for stereotype-congruent compared to stereotype-incongruent targets. In sum, the current thesis reveals that both adults and children not only automatically activate occupation-related sex-role stereotypes, but they also negatively evaluate those in counter-stereotypical professions. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:582703 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Flannigan, Natasha |
| Publisher | University of Aberdeen |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://digitool.abdn.ac.uk:80/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=201895 |
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