Gender-related assessment of childhood play

Parent-report based scales for the assessment of sex-dimorphic behavior are an important tool in research on psychosexual differentiation and its disorders. This paper presents the factor analysis and corresponding scale development for the slightly expanded Child Game Participation Questionnaire (Bates & Bentler, 1973), based on the parents of a demographically diverse school sample of 355 girls and 333 boys aged 6 to 10 years. Evidence supporting each of three theoretical positions in gender assessment--unidimensional bipolar, two-dimensional unipolar, and multidimensional--was provided. Effect sizes were unusually large for gender, but small for age, socioeconomic level, and race/ethnicity.