Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ARTICLESGender-Specific Characteristics of 5-Year-Olds' Play Narratives and Associations With Behavior Ratings
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
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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).