Vietnamese children’s play and parents’ prejudice, stereotypes and discrimination on the basis of gender and social classes: A quantitative study

Abstract

This study aims to explore parents’ prejudice, stereotypes and discrimination towards their children’s play on the basis of social classes and gender, applying a Likert scale ‘Parents’ prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination towards their children’s play, based on gender and social classes’ (PPSD) with 760 Vietnamese parents inhabiting in the country. The Likert scale was built, applying the Delphi method and analysed with Cronbach alpha test and Factor Analysis in order to validate the measurement tool. After that, Descriptive Analysis, Kruskal-Wallis test and Man Whitney U test were utilised to analyse the impact of key factors such as gender, education, income, living areas on parents’ prejudice, stereotypes and discrimination towards their children’s play. Results show that parents somewhat disagreed with the statements expressing dislike to accents and dialects of children from other social groups. However, they did not show consistency in their dislike towards behaviours and ways of speaking of children from other social classes, in which while some parents agreed, others did not. Although parents were not quite sure if they could accept the values and thoughts of children from other social groups, they quite avoided negative stereotypes as well as discrimination against them. Regarding gender, the study found out that although parents were inconsistent in their affection of children’s cross-sex play and the fact that their children like playing with toys associated with the opposite gender, they were consistent in their thinking of solidifying their children’s gender attributes through gender-specific toys. Especially, they reached agreement in their action of orientating children’s gender through children’s play and toys which need to be gender-appropriate. In addition, the study also reported that gender, education, living areas and income affect parents’ prejudice, stereotypes and discrimination towards their children’s play, based on social class and gender.