| Summary: | <p>The present exploratory study aims to explore how stories that challenge gender-stereotypical activities and gender-stereotypical emotion expressions modify four-year-old urban Chinese preschool children’s 1) knowledge and attitudes on these target activities and emotion expressions, 2) playmate selection on same-sex peers preferring these target activities, and 3) peer perception of these target emotion expressions. A theoretically and methodologically rigorous quasi-experimental storytelling intervention with a cluster-randomized design was implemented on 39 four-year-old urban Chinese preschool children from a kindergarten in Shenzhen, China. Child participants were randomly assigned, in class units, to receive sixteen 20-minute story sessions with stories that either challenge (intervention group) or align with (control group) gender-stereotypical activities and gender-stereotypical emotion expressions for four weeks. At the same time, they were pre- and post-tested through a 15-minute individual assessment on measures of 1) sex-role discrimination, egalitarian sex-role model, and sex-role flexibility of gender-stereotypical activities and gender-stereotypical emotion expressions, 2) stereotyped playmate selection, and 3) stereotyped peer perception. Overall, although the Rank ANCOVA showed that differences between child participants in the intervention group and the control group were insignificant for all measures, analysis of general patterns and cases of matched pairs revealed nuances of 1) trends of alteration, or 2) resistance of alteration, for each measure. Therefore, a longer storytelling intervention is needed for better understanding these nuances. Additionally, Spearman’s Correlation revealed how knowledge and attitudes were related differently for gender-stereotypical activities and gender-stereotypical emotion expressions. These results together offer 1) theoretical insights into, for example, development of gender stereotypes with different social significance, and 2) practical insights into, for example, practices of gender equality education in early education.</p>
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