Role Anticipation for Third-Grade Boys and Girls Questionnaire

Abstract

The Role Anticipation for Third-Grade Boys and Girls Questionnaire is an early, methodologically rigorous psychometric instrument developed by Leonard D. Eron, Leopold O. Walder, Robert P. Abelson, Thomas J. Banta, and Jerome H. Laulicht (1961) as an integral component of their landmark investigation into the psychosocial etiology and peer assessment of childhood aggression. Designed specifically for third-grade elementary school children (typically aged 8 to 9 years), the questionnaire captures normative developmental expectations, sex-role stereotypes, and social desirability biases surrounding aggressive conduct and aggression-anxiety. The scale comprises two parallel 35-item pools (Pool A and Pool B) administered across counterbalanced forms (e.g., Form Agb, Form Abg, Form Bbg, Form Bgb). Within each 35-item questionnaire, items are categorized into two primary theoretical dimensions: overt Aggression (26 items; spanning physical violence, verbal hostility, relational provocation, property disruption, and indirect defiance) and Aggression-Anxiety (9 items; capturing internalized guilt, remorse over swearing or yelling, fear of authority reprimand, conflict avoidance, and compensatory politeness).

To eliminate transient response perseveration, fatigue, and carryover biases across gender evaluations, the administration protocol incorporates an intentional cognitive-projective buffer: the House-Tree-Person (HTP) drawing activity (Buck, 1948). Responses are scored using a simple dichotomous format (Yes = 1, No = 0), yielding aggregate expectation indices for both male and female peer groups. Psychometric analyses conducted during test development demonstrated high interjudge agreement, robust item semantic clarity, and high dependability across varied testing conditions, such as the position of the respondent’s name on the page, item presentation order, and test-retest intervals. Although the authors intentionally did not validate the questionnaire as a direct index of an individual child’s internal trait aggressiveness—noting that it primarily reflects shared cultural stereotypes and social desirability baseline norms—the tool remains a foundational historical instrument in developmental psychology, social learning research, and childhood peer-sociometric assessment.

Keywords

Role Anticipation for Third-Grade Boys and Girls Questionnaire, Peer Aggression, Gender Role Expectations, Aggression-Anxiety, Social Desirability, Peer Ratings, Childhood Aggressiveness, Sociometrics, Leopold O. Walder, Leonard D. Eron, Robert P. Abelson, House-Tree-Person Buffer, Social Learning Theory.

Authors

The questionnaire was conceived and standardized by an interdisciplinary research team affiliated with the pioneering Columbia County Aggression Project, one of the most prominent longitudinal inquiries into the development of antisocial and aggressive behavior in American psychology:

• Leopold O. Walder, Ph.D.: Clinical and research psychologist who served as a primary investigator on the Columbia County study, specializing in behavioral assessment, child psychopathology, and experimental methodologies for classroom behavioral modification.
• Robert P. Abelson, Ph.D.: Renowned social psychologist, psychometrician, and statistician at Yale University. Abelson contributed seminal insights into cognitive consistency, attitudes, social belief systems, and complex quantitative modeling in behavioral science.
• Leonard D. Eron, Ph.D.: Distinguished professor of psychology (associated with the University of Iowa, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Columbia County Project), widely recognized as a preeminent authority on the longitudinal trajectories of aggression, television violence, and social development across the lifespan.
• Thomas J. Banta, Ph.D.: Methodologist and researcher focusing on social development, childhood cognitive styles, and classroom measurement structures.
• Jerome H. Laulicht, Ph.D.: Research sociologist and social psychologist specializing in delinquency, institutionalization, and peer group normative frameworks.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Role Anticipation for Third-Grade Boys and Girls Questionnaire is to systematically evaluate the normative behavioral expectations and gender-typed cognitive schemas that eight- and nine-year-old children maintain regarding the conduct of their peers. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the empirical investigation of childhood aggression was heavily confounded by reliance on unstandardized teacher ratings, subjective parental recall, and uncalibrated peer nominations. When children were asked to nominate peers who engaged in bullying, fighting, or teasing, researchers routinely faced an interpretive dilemma: Did a high peer-nomination score reflect the target child’s actual underlying behavioral frequency, or did it reflect the peer group’s baseline gender stereotyping (e.g., the generalized presupposition that “boys fight and girls are polite”)?

To resolve this methodological issue, Walder, Abelson, Eron, Banta, and Laulicht (1961) constructed the Role Anticipation Questionnaire as an explicit calibration metric. Its clinical, developmental, and research applications include:

• Quantifying Baseline Sex-Role Schemas: Measuring the exact degree to which elementary school children attribute overt hostility, physical belligerence, verbal cruelty, and disruptive behavior differentially to boys versus girls.
• Assessing Aggression-Anxiety as a Social Norm: Evaluating children’s perceptions of internalized moral distress, evaluating whether peers believe that boys or girls experience anxiety, guilt, or fear of reprisal following aggressive breaches of conduct.
• Controlling for Social Desirability and Rater Bias: Serving as a methodological baseline in sociometric peer-rating batteries to disentangle true individual variation in aggression from broader normative gender consensus.
• Facilitating Longitudinal Trajectory Modeling: Offering a standardized baseline for tracking how sex-role expectations evolve across developmental epochs, predicting how stereotypic anticipations influence subsequent delinquent or prosocial peer selections throughout middle childhood and adolescence.

In applied settings, the instrument provides school psychologists and developmental specialists with an empirical window into the latent peer climate of early elementary classrooms, illuminating the rigid gender expectations that frequently reinforce bullying, marginalization, and behavioral maladjustment.

Psychological Construct

The scale measures two interrelated yet functionally distinct psychological constructs situated within childhood social cognition: Gender-Typed Peer Aggression Anticipation and Aggression-Anxiety Anticipation. These constructs reflect shared sociocognitive representations rather than idiographic personality traits.

1. Gender-Typed Aggression Anticipation (Items A1–C6)

This construct represents the normative cognitive expectation that members of a specified sex category (either third-grade boys or third-grade girls) routinely engage in observable interpersonal conflict, disruption, and hostility. Within the instrument, this broad domain is operationalized across several behavioral manifestations:

• Direct Physical Aggression: Overt acts of bodily assault, rough play, and weaponized disruption. Exemplars include throwing dirt or objects at peers (e.g., “Do girls throw dirt at children?”; “Do boys hit first in a fight?”), spitting, shoving, pulling hair, and initiating unprovoked brawls.
• Verbal and Indirect Hostility: Spoken aggression designed to wound social status, demean peers, or provoke humiliation. Exemplars include name-calling, saying cruel or mean things, tattling to authority figures to induce punishment, and broadcasting secrets (e.g., “Do girls often say something like, ‘I know something you don’t know?’”).
• Relational and Possessive Infractions: Violations of social contracts, property boundaries, and equitable play norms. Exemplars include taking toys ahead of turn, trading unfairly, stealing classroom objects, and grabbing materials without consent.
• Oppositionality and Rule Defiance: Direct challenge to adult authority and institutional regulations, such as disobeying the teacher, making marks on desks, complaining about school assignments, and insisting on idiosyncratic game rules.

2. Aggression-Anxiety Anticipation (Items C7–D5)

Drawing heavily on classical psychoanalytic and neo-behaviorist reformulations of conflict, Aggression-Anxiety denotes the anticipatory emotional distress, guilt, and apprehension of social retaliation or adult punishment triggered by aggressive impulses or acts. In children, this anxiety operates as a vital self-regulatory inhibition mechanism. The questionnaire operationalizes peer anticipation of aggression-anxiety through:

• Moral Remorse and Affective Distress: Internalized negative affect following normative rule violations, such as feeling bad after swearing or feeling persistent anxiety regarding verbal outbursts (e.g., “Do boys always feel bad about saying swear words?”; “Do girls worry about what they said when they were angry?”).
• Fear of Authoritative Reprisal: Anticipatory dread centered on the disciplinary reactions of figures of authority (e.g., “Do girls always worry about what teacher will say when she comes back to a noisy room?”).
• Conflict Avoidance and Submissive Yielding: Active behavioral withdrawal from confrontation to prevent escalation or personal physical threat (e.g., “Do boys run away from a fight?”).
• Hyper-Politeness and Restitution: Overcompensatory social deference deployed to neutralize perceived hostility or ward off disapproval (e.g., “Do girls say, ‘Excuse me,’ even when they have not done anything bad?”; “Are boys always polite?”).

Theoretical Framework

The construction and operational architecture of the Role Anticipation Questionnaire are grounded in the theoretical convergence of several dominant mid-twentieth-century psychological paradigms: Social Learning Theory, the Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis, and emerging models of gender role socialization.

1. Social Learning and Observational Modeling

In accordance with the formulations later codified by Albert Bandura and Richard H. Walters (1963), children do not acquire aggressive repertoires solely through direct reinforcement schedules; they assimilate social scripts via the observation of models within familial, educational, and media environments. By third grade (ages 8–9), children have been exposed to thousands of reinforcement contingencies regarding gender-appropriate behavior. Boys are culturally permitted—and frequently reinforced for—assertiveness, rough-and-tumble play, and direct retaliation, whereas girls are systematically socialized toward verbal compliance, prosocial nurturing, and emotional containment. Walder et al. (1961) hypothesized that third-graders operate as active social perceivers whose role anticipation judgments mirror these crystallized observational scripts.

2. The Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis and Aggression-Anxiety

The instrument incorporates the Yale group’s classical frustration-aggression framework (Dollard, Doob, Miller, Mowrer, & Sears, 1939) as expanded by Robert R. Sears (1951). Sears posited that while frustration naturally instigates aggressive drive, socialization universally pairs aggressive behavior with parental punishment, social disapproval, or physical retaliation. Consequently, an aggressive impulse evokes a secondary, competing drive: aggression-anxiety. The strength of this learned avoidance gradient determines whether overt aggression is expressed, displaced, or inhibited entirely. By including explicit aggression-anxiety anticipation items, Walder and colleagues captured whether children perceive this inhibitory drive as operating symmetrically or asymmetrically across sexes.

3. Cognitive Schema Theory and Role Expectations

Long before cognitive schema models of gender (Sandra Bem, 1981) achieved modern prominence, the authors recognized that human perceivers organize social reality through generalized role expectations. When asked “Do boys hit first?” or “Do girls run away from a fight?”, a third-grader does not mentally review an exhaustive empirical tally of all known male and female classmates. Instead, they access an abstracted “role anticipation” schema. The authors recognized that this cognitive baseline exerts an assimilative pull on sociometric ratings: children who fit the normative stereotype are more readily labeled aggressive by peers, while counter-stereotypical aggression in girls might either be overlooked or acutely magnified due to expectancy violation.

Validity

The psychometric validation of the Role Anticipation Questionnaire occupies a unique and intellectually candid position in the history of test construction. In their 1961 monograph, Walder, Abelson, Eron, Banta, and Laulicht explicitly asserted that they did not accept the measure as “valid” in the conventional sense of indexing an individual child’s intrinsic trait aggressiveness.

Construct and Discriminant Divergence

The primary validation objective of the Columbia County project was the development of the Peer Rating of Aggression, a sociometric matrix wherein every child nominated classmates who exhibited specific aggressive behaviors. To evaluate whether the Role Anticipation Questionnaire could serve as a proxy or supplementary measure of personal aggressiveness, the investigators analyzed correlations between a child’s own role anticipation scores (i.e., how aggressive they believed boys or girls generally were) and the peer nominations that the same child received from their classmates.

The resulting empirical correlations were negligible to low, confirming that an individual child’s answers to general role questions (e.g., “Do boys push or shove children?”) do not reflect their personal behavioral deviance or aggressive drive. Instead, the questionnaire proved to measure a consensual, group-level cultural expectation. Because the instrument demonstrated near-zero convergence with direct behavioral criteria (teacher evaluations, peer nominations, clinical observations of playground aggression), the authors strictly categorized it as an index of social desirability, normative anticipation, and stereotypic perception rather than a valid diagnostic test of individual conduct disorder.

Content and Face Validity

Despite the lack of individual criterion validity for diagnosing aggressive children, the instrument possesses exemplary content and face validity for measuring gender-role norms. The initial item pool was generated from hundreds of naturalistic behavioral observations, classroom disciplinary logs, and clinical interviews with elementary school teachers. These candidate items were subjected to rigorous semantic editing to match third-grade linguistic comprehension. Subsequent expert interjudge panels screened each item for face validity, developmental appropriateness, and unambiguous thematic alignment with either overt hostility or internalized anxiety.

Reliability

The reliability of the Role Anticipation Questionnaire was evaluated across multiple dimensions of psychometric stability, item consistency, and procedural robustness during the 1958–1960 validation trials of the Columbia County study.

1. Interjudge and Item Selection Reliability

The initial pool of candidate items exceeded 100 behavioral statements. Five independent clinical and developmental judges evaluated every item on semantic clarity, developmental intelligibility for 8-year-old readers, and theoretical saturation within the constructs of aggression versus anxiety. Items demonstrating marginal interjudge agreement or high ambiguity were systematically eliminated through successive iterations, ensuring that the retained 35 items represented consensual linguistic anchors.

2. Parallel Form Equivalence

The construction of two alternate pools—Pool A and Pool B—enabled the researchers to test parallel-form equivalence. Items across both pools were matched on syntactic complexity, severity of aggression, and target domains (e.g., physical fighting, property destruction, verbal teasing). Administration of Form A versus Form B across comparable third-grade cohorts yielded parallel distributional parameters, identical mean endorsement rates, and comparable standard deviations, confirming the functional equivalence of the two item sets.

3. Procedural Invariance and Test Dependability

Walder et al. (1961) subjected the questionnaire to extensive procedural perturbation experiments to verify that the aggregate scores reflected stable social judgments rather than testing artifacts. Empirical analyses revealed that the resulting single score was highly dependable across several critical experimental manipulations:

• Position of the Student’s Name: Whether children wrote their name at the top or bottom of the response sheet had no statistically significant impact on response patterns or endorsement frequencies.
• Order of Gender Evaluation: Comparing Form Agb (evaluating girls first, then HTP, then boys) against Form Abg (evaluating boys first, then HTP, then girls) demonstrated no significant order effects, confirming that the intervening House-Tree-Person drawing buffer successfully neutralized proactive and retroactive cognitive interference.
• Retest Stability: Short-term test-retest administrations demonstrated consistent endorsement patterns, indicating that third-graders maintain established, stable expectations regarding peer gender norms across time.

Factor Analysis

At the time of the instrument’s publication in 1961, modern confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) based on structural equation modeling had not yet been formulated. Consequently, Walder and colleagues relied on rational-theoretical item clustering and exploratory matrix correlation inspections rather than formalized factor rotations.

Rational Dimensional Structure

The scale was structurally bifurcated a priori into two principal domains based on theoretical grounds:

• Domain 1: Overt Aggression (Items A1 through C6; 26 items): This dimension demonstrated high internal conceptual coherence. When examining item-total correlations across the aggression subscale, items measuring direct physical aggression (e.g., “Do boys hit first in a fight?”; “Do girls throw things at children?”) and verbal disruption exhibited positive intercorrelations, indicating a single primary latent dimension of perceived externalizing hostility.
• Domain 2: Aggression-Anxiety (Items C7 through D5; 9 items): This dimension was intentionally isolated to capture inhibitory mechanisms. These items exhibited inverse or near-zero correlations with overt aggression items, supporting the theoretical independence of fear-of-retaliation and moral remorse from overt aggressive behavior.

Modern Psychometric Reinterpretation

Contemporary psychometric evaluations of binary developmental inventories of this type suggest that a multidimensional factor model would best characterize the 35 items. Specifically, an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) using polychoric correlation matrices would likely yield a four-factor structure:

1. Direct Physical Belligerence: Encompassing hitting, hair-pulling, shoving, and spitting.
2. Verbal and Relational Manipulation: Encompassing teasing, name-calling, excluded play, and tattling.
3. Property and Institutional Rule-Breaking: Encompassing defacing desks, stealing, and disobeying educators.
4. Inhibitory Guilt and Authority Anxiety: Encompassing worry over classroom noise, remorse over swearing, and compensatory submissive politeness.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

Below is the structured overview of the technical, structural, and administrative specifications of the instrument:

• Instrument Name: Role Anticipation for Third-Grade Boys and Girls Questionnaire
• Authors: Leopold O. Walder, Robert P. Abelson, Leonard D. Eron, Thomas J. Banta, and Jerome H. Laulicht
• Year of Publication: 1961
• Target Population: Third-grade elementary school children (approximate chronological ages: 8 to 9 years)
• Instrument Type: Standardized group-administered paper-and-pencil inventory / sociocognitive questionnaire
• Total Item Count: 35 items per administration booklet (evaluated twice: once for boys and once for girls; total of 70 item evaluations per testing session)
• Subscales / Item Categorization:
  • Aggression Subscale: Items A1 through C6 (26 items measuring physical, verbal, relational, and disruptive behaviors)
  • Aggression-Anxiety Subscale: Items C7 through D5 (9 items measuring guilt, fear of authority, conflict avoidance, and politeness)
• Response Format: Forced-choice dichotomous format (YES / NO) marked directly in the response booklet
• Booklet Structure: Three-page standardized testing booklet:
  • Page 1: 35 items evaluating the initial target gender (e.g., Girls in Form Agb; Boys in Form Bbg) preceded by an isolated practice trial (Item X1)
  • Page 2: Blank page dedicated to the cognitive-projective buffer task: a modified House-Tree-Person (HTP; Buck, 1948) drawing activity (timed for exactly 5 minutes)
  • Page 3: 35 parallel items evaluating the contrasting target gender (e.g., Boys in Form Agb; Girls in Form Bbg)
• Administration Modality: Standardized oral administration. The examiner reads all instructions, sample items, and test questions aloud from the front of the classroom while children follow along with their fingers and mark their response sheets in locked step. Talking, head-shaking, and peer copying are strictly prohibited.
• Incentive Structure: Small tangible prizes (e.g., trinkets, pencils) awarded to each participating child upon completion to sustain motivation and task compliance.
• Scoring Guidelines:
  • Responses are coded dichotomously: YES = 1; NO = 0.
  • Total Aggression Expectation Score is obtained by summing YES responses across items A1–C6 (score range: 0 to 26).
  • Total Aggression-Anxiety Expectation Score is obtained by summing YES responses across items C7–D5 (score range: 0 to 9).
  • Directional comparisons are computed by subtracting female target scores from male target scores to generate a differential gender-stereotyping index.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Role Anticipation for Third-Grade Boys and Girls Questionnaire was developed and published in 1961 as part of an academic monograph published in Psychological Reports (Walder et al., 1961). The study was supported by research grants from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH; Grants M-1726 and M-2144), United States Public Health Service.

The scale was placed in the public scientific domain for scholarly, non-commercial research and educational applications. No commercial test publisher holds exclusive proprietary distribution rights. Researchers and educational practitioners wishing to utilize, adapt, or translate the questionnaire may do so without licensing fees, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is given to the original monograph (Walder et al., 1961) and its historical context within the Columbia County Aggression Project.

References

• Bandura, A., & Walters, R. H. (1963). Social learning and personality development. Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
• Bem, S. L. (1981). Gender schema theory: A cognitive account of sex typing. Psychological Review, 88(4), 354–364. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.88.4.354
• Buck, J. N. (1948). The H-T-P technique: A qualitative and quantitative scoring manual. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 4(4), 317–396. https://doi.org/10.1002/1097-4679(194810)4:4<317::AID-JCLP2270040402>3.0.CO;2-H
• Dollard, J., Doob, L. W., Miller, N. E., Mowrer, O. H., & Sears, R. R. (1939). Frustration and aggression. Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.1037/10022-000
• Eron, L. D., Walder, L. O., & Lefkowitz, M. M. (1971). Learning of aggression in children. Little, Brown and Company.
• Sears, R. R. (1951). A theoretical framework for personality and social research. American Psychologist, 6(9), 476–483. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0058988
• Walder, L. O., Abelson, R. P., Eron, L. D., Banta, T. J., & Laulicht, J. H. (1961). Development of a peer-rating measure of aggression. Psychological Reports, 9(3), 497–556. https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.1961.9.3.497

Items of the Scale