ARTICLES
Gender-Specific Characteristics of 5-Year-Olds' Play Narratives and Associations With Behavior Ratings

https://doi.org/10.1097/00004583-200008000-00017Get rights and content

ABSTRACT

Objectives

To examine the content and structure of children's play narratives in a large sample of 5-year-olds in order to replicate previous findings, explore the role of gender differences, and identify a pattern that can provide useful information about children's behavior.

Method

The MacArthur Story Stem Battery and coding system was used to code content themes and coherence from play narratives of 652 twins in a nonclinical sample. To measure behavior problems, parents completed the Child Behavior Checklist when their children were aged 5 and 7 years; teachers completed the Teacher's Report Form when the children were aged 7 years.

Results

Girls told more coherent narratives with less aggression than boys. Aggressive themes were found to correlate with behavior problems as in previous studies. Upon further examination, this correlation held for girls but not boys. Children who told repeated aggressive/incoherent narratives had more behavior problems than those who did not show this narrative pattern.

Conclusions

The Story Stem methodology is useful for gaining access into the young child's inner world. The gender of the child, content of the story, and coherence of the story all provide useful information in identifying narratives that may indicate more risk for behavior problems.

Section snippets

Research Questions and Hypotheses

The interpretation of recent play narrative research has been limited by relatively small sample sizes. Therefore, investigators have not been able to look at themes in individual stories in relation to the coherence of the story, nor have they been able to explore sex differences. The current study made use of a large data set of more than 5,000 play narratives elicited by the MSSB and collected from 652 five-year-old same-sex twins. We assess the following hypotheses: (1) in replication of

Sample

The sample was part of the MacArthur Longitudinal Twin Study (Emde et al., 1992, Reznick et al., 1997). Same-sex twin pairs were recruited from birth reports from the Colorado Department of Health. The sample reported on in this article was predominantly 2-parent families of whom 92% were European American, 4% Hispanic American, 0.3% Asian American, and 3.7% American Indian and mixed ethnicity. The mean age of parents was 30 years for mothers and 31.5 years for fathers. Most families were

Correlations Between Narrative Aggregates and CBCL Ratings

Table 2 shows the correlations between the content and performance aggregates of the narratives at age 5, and the CBCL Externalizing and Internalizing scores. The aggregate of aggressive narrative themes correlates positively with all CBCL Externalizing scores. The correlations, although significant, are low (0.09 to 0.23). The correlations between the aggregate of aggressive themes and Internalizing scores are nonsignificant to low (0.01 to 0.14). There are no significant correlations between

DISCUSSION

The use of the MSSB in a sample of more than 600 preschool children has provided us an opportunity to learn more about themes and structures of play narratives in a low-risk population of preschool children and their cross-sectional and longitudinal associations with behavior problems. The larger number of subjects than available for previous studies allowed us to examine systematically the influence of sex on children's narratives and to identify meaningful narrative patterns by combining

REFERENCES (22)

  • MS Scheeringa et al.

    Two approaches to the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder in infancy and early childhood

    J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry

    (1995)
  • S Warren et al.

    Can emotions and themes in children's play predict behavior problems?

    J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry

    (1996)
  • TM Achenbach

    Manual for the Child Behavior Checklist/4–18 and 1991 Profile

    (1991)
  • TM Achenbach

    Manual for the Teacher's Report Form and 1991 Profile

    (1991)
  • W Bucci

    Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Science

    (1997)
  • JP Buckner et al.

    Gender and self in children's autobiographical narratives

    Appl Cognit Psychol

    (1998)
  • CR Cloninger et al.

    Implications of sex differences in the prevalences of antisocial personality, alcoholism, and criminality for familial transmission

    Arch Gen Psychiatry

    (1978)
  • JA Crowell et al.

    Discriminant validity of the Adult Attachment Interview

    Child Dev

    (1996)
  • MJ Drell et al.

    Post-traumatic stress disorder

  • RN Emde

    Moving ahead: integrating influences of affective processes for development and for psychoanalysis

    Int J Psychoanal

    (1999)
  • RN Emde et al.

    Temperament, emotion, and cognition at fourteen months: the MacArthur Longitudinal Twin Study

    Child Dev

    (1992)
  • Cited by (0)

    This work was supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Network for Early Childhood Transitions, by award of Stiftung für Lehre und Forschung (Dr. von Klitzing), by Developmental Psychobiology Research Fellowships (Dr. Schmitz and Kelsay), and by Research Scientist Award 5K02MH36808 (Dr. Emde).

    View full text