Abstract
The present study examines sociocultural variations of gender differences reflected in the future orientation of Israeli Jews and Arabs as cases of modernity vs. transition to modernity, respectively. One hundred and twelve Jewish adolescents (61 males and 51 females) and 116 Arab adolescents (67 males and 49 females), all high school seniors in a college-bound program, responded to an open-ended future orientation questionnaire and listed their hopes and fears for the future. These responses were categorized into eight life domains (school and matriculation, military service, higher education, work and career, marriage and family, self, others, collective issues) and each domain was analyzed in terms of salience (i.e., importance and interest, assessed by number of pertinent statements) and specificity (i.e., extent of detail and concreteness, rated on a 1–3 scale). Results supported the hopothesized instrumental-expressive division between Jewish males and females and the primacy of higher education for Arab females. Analysis employing U. Bronfenbrenner's (The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979) ecological model of development suggests that these gender differences are sustained by the developmental settings of Jewish and Arab adolescents.
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The author wishes to acknowledge the help of Susan Bashara, Sana Gamal, Carmela Haloon and Camil Nagar in data collection and translation, and of Yoav Seginer and Sandra Zukerman in data analysis. She is grateful to her colleagues Moussa Karyanni, Mariam Mar'i and the late Sami Mar'i for their help in the various stages of this study, and to John E. Hofman and Mariam Mar'i for their comments on an earlier version of this report.
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Seginer, R. Adolescents' orientation toward the future: Sex role differentiation in a sociocultural context. Sex Roles 18, 739–757 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00288058
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00288058