Qualitative Study Of Gender Socialization

Socialization is a lifelong process where individuals in the society learn about social expectations and how to interact with other people. Nearly all of the behaviour that we consider to be human nature is learned through socialization. It is during socialisation where humans learn behavioural norms that help us fit into society. Socialisation occurs throughout our life. Boys and girls in today’s society are under pressure to follow the norms constructed by the society in order to act in an appropriate assigned sex and gender they fall in at all times. Although socialisation is a life-long process, it primarily occurs during infancy plus childhood and refers to the process by which children and adults learn from others the culture of the society

This is because children’s understandings and experiences of gender are worthy of study in their own right, in isolation of the perspective and concerns of adults, and hence such experiences reveal that children are not passive subjects of social structures. Thus researchers have used a variety of qualitative research methods that purport to engage youth as active participants and agents, or rather as the ‘experts’ on their social

It is essentially an interesting participatory action research strategy that uses photography as a way of giving voice to the research participants. As witnessed by how Mayeza (2014: 42) uses play-related drawing exercises to stimulate gender focused discussions under a semi-structured interview. Different to the qualitative method however, photo-voice, as a research method has three main goals. Firstly, to enable people to record and reflect their community’s strengths and concerns, secondly to promote critical dialogue and knowledge about important issues through large and small group discussion of photographs, and thirdly to reach and influence policymakers. In practice we see how Mitchell et al. (2005: 4-8) uses photo-voice to identifying an issue and by taking pictures conduct discussions based on the photographs and the issues they highlight. This results in taking action towards addressing the issue(s) through evaluation. Thus, using photo-voice approaches with children and young people helps both to understand more about how they see the construction of gender socialisation as well as the manner in which they are active agents in this socialisation (Mitchell, 2005: 2). That is to say, ‘picture viewing’ are themselves visual testimonies to total absorption in meaning making (Mitchell,