Effect of Infant’s Perceived Gender on Adolescents’ Ratings of the Infant is a research proposal done by, Douglas Degelman, Veronika Dvorak, and Julie Ann Homutoff at Vanguard University of Southern California. This research proposal aims to explore stereotypical sex role appropriate traits. The researchers aim to explore that idea by having 36 junior high students (18 boys and 18 girls) view a photo of a 3-month-old infant. Then, the students will be told that the baby’s name is Larry, Laurie, or they will not be told the infants name. After viewing the photo and name or no name, the students are asked to rate the infant on a few bipolar adjective scales: firm/soft/big/little, strong/weak, hardy/delicate, well coordinated/awkward, and beautiful/plain. The researchers predict that both the name assigned to the infant and the students’ gender will affect the ratings. This study is important because stereotyped expectations may influence gender role socialization and the acquiring of sex-typed behavior. Another reason as to why this study is important is because preconceived gender-based expectations can cause the parent to elicit expected behavior from the infant and to reinforce the expected behavior when it occurs. Several studies have been done before to explain this type of behavior, however, this study also aims to see whether or not males and females have different preconceived notions on infants depending on if they are boys or girls. For instance, a man may see a picture of a female baby and choose that that baby is delicate and/or weak but if they were to see that same photo and are told that the baby is a male the man may then choose the adjectives hardy and/or strong, directly showing gender stereotypes that are ever prevalent. Overall, this study proposes the idea that adult responses coincide with culturally specified sex stereotypes related with the gender label assigned to an infant and independent of actual infant gender differences. Lastly, the type of data needed for this research proposal is shallow opinions and attitudes, the researchers plan on using surveys as their type of data collection method and once the results are in they plan to read their results by comparing each of the dependent variables with the independent variable, which would be a type of categorical data. I found this research proposal to be very thought-provoking and would make for very fascinating results, I would not change anything about it. I believe that my classmates would agree with that as well and would be interested in seeing the results.

Link to proposal: http://www.vanguard.edu/psychology/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/proposal.pdf