The central objective of the present study was to investigate how girls interpret gender-role stereotypes in Disney Princess media and how they incorporate these interpretations into their pretend play behaviors. Preschool girls in our study exhibited highly gendered patterns of play when pretending to be princesses, and they displayed four distinct princess themes, including attention to beauty, increased focus on clothing and accessories, specific body movements, and the exclusion of boys. Although we had hypothesized that girls would endorse the gender stereotypes associated with the princesses in their interviews, we did not anticipate that the girls would also maintain them in their pretend play. The reappearance of these four themes across all classes, combined with the girls' near formulaic assessment of the princesses in their interviews, suggests that princess play confines girls to preset and gendered narratives in their play. Based on this sample's immense exposure to Disney Princess mediaon average, they watched Disney Princess screen media once per week and owned about 13 Disney Princess products eachparticipants likely developed their uniform concept of a princess through access to Disney Princesses. Their preconceived notions of the princesses translated to their enactments of the Disney females during pretend play, when the girls again displayed distinct patterns of princess play. As had been posited by Linn (2009), girls became locked into a set script for how to play princess from which it was hard to deviate. The first of the four themes identified by our study, beauty, provides such evidence to support past theory. In making beauty remarks, girls displayed a shift in their attention from their play stories and surroundings to their physical appearances. As displayed by their interview responses, girls considered beauty to be one of the princesses' most dominant and important traits. All of the girls reported that princesses were pretty, and many explained that they liked a princess or would want to be a princess because of her physical appearance. The girls' idealization of the princesses' beauty relates to the findings of the APA Task Force (2007), which reported that girls and young women with greater exposure to mainstream media content placed appearance and physical attractiveness at the center of women's value. Accordingly, many of the girls in our study placed beauty at the center of a princess's value, equating her appearance with her other attributes such as niceness. When pretending to be princesses themselves, the girls consequently became the objects of beauty whose most important characteristic was her appearance. Girls made exclamations about how pretty they looked; they implored other students in the class to admire their beauty; and they appraised their appearances and compared themselves to other students. Through these activities, they potentially laid the groundwork for self-objectification, the process of viewing oneself as an object that exists for the sake of appearance. Considering the findings of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls (2007, p. 22), self-objectifying behavior could have serious future ramifications for girls. Similarly, girls' focus on princess clothing and accessories narrowed their play to beauty-related behaviors. In concentrating on the princesses' dresses and accessories, girls again assessed their own bodies and appearances in the dresses. To attain the princess beauty ideal, they consumed a significant portion of their pretend playtime assembling the best outfit and searching for accessories to complete their looks. In this way, they displayed the Bfaith in commodities^ about which Giroux and Pollock (2010, p. 123) warned. Disney sells the princess images to girls along with the message that they need to buy Disney's ready-made princess items if they want to be pretty like the princesses (Giroux and Pollock 2010). Through this process, in trying to emulate the Disney females they observed, girls'sense of beauty was reduced to the attainment of material possessions. Moreover, girls modeled feminine behavior through their body movements while dressed as princesses. The three unique princess body movements that they displayed twirling, ballroom dancing, and hand posingall reinforced their Bgirly girl^ roles. Blaise (2005a, p. 66), from a feminist post-structuralist perspective, identified twirling in particular as a highly gendered body movement through which girls actively took part in Bconstructing and reconstructing heterosexual gender norms.^ Often she found that girls exaggerated their twirls to capture the attention of others, most often boys. Girls in our study made similar displays, as when Mariah yelled to a boy across the room to tell him that she looked pretty and then twirled. Girls made clear associations between the Disney Princesses and the body movements they chose to enact. For example, prior to twirling, some girls referenced a particular character. BLook, I'm Rapunzel,^ one girl announced before she twirled. In this way, they demonstrated that they intended to emulate the princesses by performing movements that they associated with them. Often these prescribed body movements restricted girls from assuming more satisfying positions. For instance, the girls who displayed hand posing reduced themselves to idle viewers instead of active participants as the superhero boys fought for their protection. Unwilling to break from their preconceived ideas of a princess as a poised, though passive observer, the girls maintained their stiff positions. Girls practiced the gendered movements that they observed from the princesses, negotiating the presentation of their bodies to fit a specific role. The fourth unique theme, exclusion of boys from princess play, solidified the distinction between boys and girls, promoting what Ramsey (1998) referred to as gender cleavage. The phenomenon of gender cleavage in the classroom due to the introduction of Disney Princess media has been documented in past research as well (Baker-Sperry 2007). In the current study, girls affirmed that princesses were intended for girls and not for boys both through their play behaviors and interview responses. While dressed as princesses, girls behaved in more feminized ways and, accordingly, they interacted differently with their male peers. Whereas the girls considered each other Bsisters,^ as demonstrated by the ballroom dancing pair, they reacted to the boys as non-princess others, entirely separate from themselves. During the preliminary observations, without the imposition of the princess props, the children behaved in ways that overcame strict gendered roles. Although the children remained divided by gender for the majority of the preliminary observations, girls' and boys' behaviors still mirrored each other, reflecting some semblance of equality between the genders. Girls' rigid understandings of the princesses as female-only prevented them from creating new, more inclusive roles that would involve boys as equals. Instead, by positioning themselves as girls through princess play and identifiably not as boys, they learned to distinguish their gender as one and not the other without any overlap (Davies 2003). The girls' gendered princess play behaviors present concerns in regard to their gender development. Based on the social cognitive theory of gender development and differentiation (Bussey and Bandura 1999), modeling the princesses reinforces these feminized behaviors. When these behaviors are coupled with positive responses from teachers or peers, they are further strengthened. By adhering to their predetermined concepts of the princesses, girls may reinforce a narrow set of gendered roles and behaviors. For instance, from the four princess themes they could potentially learn that one of their greatest assets is their beauty; that attaining material possessions improves their appearances; that, as princesses, they should only perform a certain set of body movements; and that boys are entirely different from themselves. Thus, if girls always play princess during pretend playtime instead of taking on different roles, they might attain a limited conception of femininity in which females are passive beauty objects. Considering findings from past studies (APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls 2007; Girls Inc 2006; Marcotte et al. 2002), developing a limited conception of femininity that is constrained by stereotypical gendered roles puts girls at risk for developing depression, anxiety, and disordered eating attitudes and symptoms. Findings from the current study are in line with those of Coyne et al. (2016) who found that exposure to Disney Princess media was associated with more female gender-stereotypical behavior. Access to Disney Princess costumes, like those used in the current study, could therefore influence real-life behaviors that extend beyond pretend play. Outcomes from the current study also correspond with past theory on the topic, which has proposed that young girls are unable to break from the gendered roles that dominate Disney Princess media when playing princess (Blaise 2005b; Linn 2009; Pollen 2011). Instead, they have argued that girls enact highly feminized, commercially driven roles in their play, which restrict their creativity and negatively impact their perceptions of femininity (Linn 2009). Evidence from our investigation substantiates these conjectures. However, findings from the current study do not align with some previous research regarding this topic. Wohlwend (2009), through an ethnographic approach, found that students improvised new plots and positions for their princess play characters as a way to overcome the gendered obstacles presented by Disney Princesses. Preschool girls in the current study, though, did not make such empowered amendments to their princess characters. Bianca, the girl dressed as Mulan who rejected the superhero boys' invitation to fight with them, exemplified this point. Instead of altering her role as a passive princess and fending off the superhero boys with powers of her own, Bianca remained motionless, trapped in the corner. Eventually she had to remind the boys of her princess character by saying, BYou're not a princess,^ thus prompting the boys to stop their fighting and come to her rescue. Even though Bianca dressed in and recognized herself as Mulan, one of the more active princesses, she still maintained a passive role, demonstrating that an overarching, stereotypical concept of the princesses might prevail among young girls despite alternative representations of the princesses. Unlike the participants in Wohlwend's study, participants in our study could not envision a more active role for their female princess characters.

Whatsampling strategydid the researchers use to decide who they would recruit for the study? Whatdetails from the articletell you it is this sampling strategy? (10%)Consult module 5