THE LATENCY-STAGE STORY PREFERENCES OF AMERICAN AND FINNISH CHILDREN

Abstract

The writers have previously described their interest in the responses children make to their favorite story and plans for a series of studies to focus on two central questions: What stories do children like? and Why do they seem to like them? Data about favorite stories for the whole of childhood, as judged retrospectively by American college students, have been reported (4, 5, 6). The present paper, the fourth in this series, concerns the story preferences of grade-school children in two countries: an American group composed of children enrolled in the fourth and fifth grades of a New Jersey school and a Finnish group of elementary school children in Helsinki. Initially, it was expected that the story preferences of the subjects, presumably in the latency stage, would reflect differences in their respective cultural contexts.