The purpose of this study is to verify the effects of gender typification, gender self-concept and their interaction on social crisis of middle-aged women in symbolic interactionist perspective.
A hypothesis of this study is that middle-aged women ex...
The purpose of this study is to verify the effects of gender typification, gender self-concept and their interaction on social crisis of middle-aged women in symbolic interactionist perspective.
A hypothesis of this study is that middle-aged women experience social identity crisis when their gender self-concepts do not correspond with their gender self-concepts.
That is, the degree of social identity crisis symptoms of middle-aged women dependents on the correspondence of therir gender self-concept types and gender typification types.
To verify my hypothesis empirically, 1 made a questionaire survey of 92 middle-aged women samples who were mothers of Dong-A University students.
Bem's Sex Role Inventory Scale was revisioned and used to classify gerder typification and geder self-concept.
Gender typifications and gender self-concepts of respondents were grouped into three types-traditional(more feminine), neutral, and modem(more masculine) ones.
And I operated my own social crisis scale.
The collected data were analyzed by T-test, Anova, and Mutiple Anova(Analysis of Corvariance).
The major findings are as follows.
1) There is no significant difference in the measure of the crisis symptoms of the social identity according to middle-aged women's gender typification types.
2) There is a significant difference in the measure of the crisis symptoms of the social identity according to gender self-concept types.
The group of the modern self-concept type got the highest point among all groups(modern, neutral, traditional): acceding to Duncan Test, there is a difference between this group and the neutral one.
3) In spite of controlling the social situations, the gender self-concept type continues to work as a main effect.
Number of child among social strutural factors and social activities and time of housework among life style variables are also significant covariates.
But the other variables have no significance covariation.
4) There is no statistically significant difference in the crisis symptoms between the group whose gender typification type corresponds with their gender self-concept type and the one does not.
5) It was expected that whether or not middle-aged women is in the empty nest period as a main characteristic of them will have an important influence on their social identity, but in this is it is not the case.
The following conclusions can be made from this study.
1) The social identity crisis of middle-aged women has a relationship to their gender self-concept types: the more modern the gender self-concept type is, the highest the degree of social identity crisis is.
2) The social identity of middle-aged women is constituted interaction between their gender self-concepts and the social typifications.
But limitations of this study are that it doesn't take consider the subjective definition of situation of middle-aged women themselves, and the samples are unrepresentive.