Exploring the relationship between single sex schools and female students’ attitudes towards gender roles: the case of Cathedral High School
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Date
2018-08
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between single-sex school environment and the gender role attitudes of female students in Cathedral High School. The study has used mixed methods; i.e. qualitative and quantitative approach. The time orientation used for the study was concurrent design which used identical samples for both components of the study. Female students in their senior year of high school were surveyed from single-sex & coeducational school using a gender role attitude inventory (Prasad & Baron, 1996). 120 questionnaires were administered to the sample population, 108 of them were filled & returned properly. Primarily, frequency counts and means for the four scales of the survey questionnaire were used to analyze & compare the attitudes of the sample by using SPSS 20.0 software, as it helps to determine the relative standing of the respondents. Aside from this, a semi-structured interview was used to collect a data on the subject matter. The survey revealed that there is no essential difference in gender role attitudes between the two samples, i.e. female students in the single sex school and female students in co-educational school. The only exception is in the area of gender role reversal, which was favored by the single-sex school. As such, students from the single-sex school are more likely to indicate comfort with the inversion of conventional gender roles. Interviews with students from both sites revealed major differences thematically. These interviews were intended to provide insight into the results of the survey as it ascertain from the students themselves what influence, if any, the absence or presence of the opposite sex in school has on their attitudes toward gender roles. The main difference between the two environments is that students in the single-sex school reported that they and their peers in the school feel quite comfortable acting “themselves” because of the lack of males in the environment. The students in the coeducational school corroborated that sentiment by expressing the tendency of their female peers to act differently in the presence of male peers. The findings from the study indicate that without the exposure to negative influence of boys on a daily basis, perhaps girls are better able to envision a world in which women are the dominant gender and that in a school environment devoid of the opposite sex, it is possible that young women are freer to imagine a society in which the order is inverted. Indisputably, this study confirms that more research is needed in the area of single-sex education for females.