Stereotypundersökning om barnfria, - ett socialpsykologiskt experiment.

Sammanfattning: To be childfree, i.e., to voluntarily not have children, deviates from the social norm. The aim of this study was to investigate the stereotype content for childfree in Sweden, and how their gender, and factors of the participants, affects the stereotype. Previous research has shown that childfree are perceived as less warm than parents. In stereotype research, women are generally perceived as more communal compared to men. According to Social Role Theory, this is because women are overrepresented in caretaking roles. Most previous research on childfree has examined attitudes to them while this study uses the AC-IN model to investigate the stereotype content based on agentic and communal characteristics. A social psychological experiment was carried out (n = 188) with a person description in a vignette in which the childfree status and gender of the person were manipulated. Results showed that childfree were stereotyped as less warm than parents, however, the difference was small. The gender of the person in the vignette did not affect the stereotype content. Parenthood of the participant was a significant predictor for both agentic and communal evaluations. The results of the study are discussed in relation to previous research.