Two young boys wearing capes playing in the garden
Developmental

The trouble with 'doing boy'

John Archer argues that social constructionist research favours politically biased interpretations of discursive material, at the expense of a large body of empirical evidence.

18 March 2004

The difference between boys and girls or men and women fascinates the public and the academic community alike, and there is a vast amount of theoretically driven and empirically based research on gender (e.g. Archer & Lloyd, 2002). In contrast, an alternative approach popular in British psychology is feminist-based social constructionism. I will provide a critical analysis of this approach, using as an example an article published in The Psychologist at the beginning of 2003, ‘The trouble with boys’ (Frosh et al., 2003).

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