Masculinity-Femininity in East African Dreams and Personality.

The article comments on earlier research on gender differences in dream reports from high school student in Kenya and attempts to develop scale of masculinity-femininity based on these dream-content areas. It informs that in earlier research on a sample of 300 dream reports from Gush, Kipsigis, and Logoli high school students in Kenya, there were seven content areas for which significant gender differences occurred. For example, it was reported that the dreams of boys more frequently included outdoor settings and the presence of implements. The dreams of girls, on the other hand, tended to include indoor settings and items of clothing. Most of the gender differences reported in the Kenyan sample minored those found in a study of the dreams of Americans. The study was to develop a scale of masculinity- femininity based on these dream-content areas and then to compare individual scores (N = 307) on that scale with several other measures of masculinity-femininity. To create the scale for dreams, it assigned each subject a single score based on the proportion of the seven dream-content items that were assigned masculine ratings.