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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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