Children’s Fictional Narratives: Gender Differences in Storytelling

Letter from the Editor
Staff Articles

• Epigenetic effects of Maternal Behavior… Sounds a lot like Attachment Theory
• Mean Kids, Mean Moms?
• Problematizing Perfectionism: A Closer Look at the Perfectionism Construct
• Food Allergy and Bullying: The Implications for Parents of Children with Food Allergies
• Child Maltreatment and Resilience in the Academic Environment

Submissions

• The Role of Consumer Satisfaction in Psychiatric Care
• The Many Treatment Methodologies for Phobias: Finding the Best Fit
• The Effect of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder on the Ability to Recognize Facial Expressions
• The Female/Athlete Paradox: Managing Traditional Views of Masculinity and Femininity
• Socio-emotional Interventions: The Efficacy of Socio-Emotional Interventions in Head Start Classrooms
• Comparing the type of trauma and the severity of PTSD symptoms in children and adolescents

Abstracts

• The Role of Community Connection for Immigrant Youth’s School Engagement
• Household Economic Shock and the Academic Experiences of College Women
• Sexual Minority Identity Development, Onset of Same-Sex Sexual Behavior, and HIV Risk Outcomes
• Parent-Child Interactions in Behavioral Treatment of Selective Mutism: A Case Study
• Children’s Fictional Narratives: Gender Differences in Storytelling
• Risk-Taking Behaviors in First Generation Immigrant Adolescents: The Role of Acculturative Stress and Social Support
• Promoting the Mathematics Achievement of Economically Disadvantaged Latino and African American Students: Understanding the Roles of Parental Involvement and Expectations
• Caregiver and Teacher Use of Evaluation and the Development of Latino Preschooler’s Socio-Emotional Skills

Staff and Writer Biographies

• Staff Bios
• Contributor Bios

Children’s ideas about gender influence various aspects of their daily life such as the toys they play with, the clothes they wear, people they befriend, and interestingly the stories they tell, both personal and fictional. Despite the fact that middle childhood is a critical point in fictional narrative development, most research has explored children’s fictional narratives only during the early childhood years. This study seeks to address this gap in the current research by investigating the features, gender differences in the performance and content, and differences across narrative contexts in the fictional narratives told by eight- to eleven- year-old children. Twenty children, evenly divided by gender, were asked to recount the two best made up stories they have ever heard and produce a story using a wordless picture book. The stories were audio and videotaped and subsequently transcribed, the coded for: (1) narrative performance using Gilliam and Gilliam’s (2010) Tracking Narrative Language Progress schema and (2) theme using Propp’s Morphology of a Folktale (1968) and Quiller-Couch’s Narrative Conflicts (1929). Results indicate that during middle childhood, children are able to tell well-structured stories independently and make use of basic conflicts and characters. Girls and boys do not differ in terms of narrative performance. However, children use more complex language when they are provided with a wordless picture book. Interestingly, there were gender differences in narrative content. Results of the study will further our awareness of fictional narrative development and the gender differences during the critical period of middle childhood.