The ideal man or woman as described by young adolescents in Iceland and the United States

Abstract

In this cross-cultural study, young adolescents in the United States and Iceland ranked characteristics of the ideal man or woman. One hundred and forty-one boys and girls (ages 11–15) answered a questionnaire taken from the textbook, Activities and Readings in Learnings and Development (M. Clifford, M. Grandgenett, and R. Bardwell, Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1981). The ranks assigned to ten qualities of the opposite-sex ideal were analyzed by Friedman tests and Kendall's coefficient of concordance. Girls and boys in both Iceland and the United States described the ideal person of the opposite sex as fun, but boys put more of an emphasis on physical attractiveness than girls. These findings give further support to related studies that have found sex differences in the description of the opposite-sex ideals (T. F. Curry and R. A. Hock, “Sex Differences in Sex Role Ideals in Early Adolescence,” Adolescence, 1981, 16, 779–789; J. S. Nevid, “Sex Differences in Factors of Romantic Attraction,” Sex Roles 1984, 11 (5/6), 401–411; K. A. Urberg, “Sex Role Conceptualization in Adolescents and Adults,” Developmental Psychology, 1979, 15, 90–92). Although the similarities between the countries outweighed the differences, one difference was that, in Iceland, girls and boys stressed the importance of whether he/she likes children in their descriptions of the ideal man or woman.