Family Role Concepts of Children Ages Six to Ten1,2

A number of social scientists have emphasized the importance of role perception as a determinant of social action (I, 9, 15, 18, 20). It is believed that role discriminations help define the constancies anticipated in each person's behavior during the ensuing interaction. Insofar as such anticipations function to mediate and guide purposeful activity, a thorough understanding of their nature is essential for predicting behavior. Very little is known about the dimensions children use to define dyadic relationships within the family. In an earlier study by the writer (7), this problem was investigated in children of 4 2 to 6 years. The present study extends the investigation to an older sample, with the purpose of describing intragroup role consensus and differences in consensus among subgroups classified according to sex and age. The descriptive aim of this study is pertinent to several areas of developmental social psychology. First, any subgroup regularities in role perception will in part describe the typical child's social space and thereby become parameters in predicting his behavior. Second, the functioning of a social system is presumably dependent upon the extent of agreement on role definitions among its members. By comparing normative data on children and parents, it should be possible to determine characteristic areas of definitional agreement and disagreement between parent and child and to relate these to indices of family integration. Third, sex and age variations in role consensus have bearing on theories of developmental change in the cognition