Children’s Dreams: A Word Search Analysis (part 4)

To summarize the results of the word search analysis so far:

The dreams of this group of 622 children ages 8-18 have more references to family, animals, and fantastic beings, more happiness and sadness, and more flying as compared to the Hall and Van de Castle “norm dreams” of young adults.

As mentioned earlier, it took less than half an hour to search all the dreams for the 40 word categories.  It would have taken perhaps 100 hours to get equally precise results using what used to be a standard method of dream content analysis (i.e., a team of two people reading the dreams, coding them, then comparing results and determining intercoder reliability).

A word search approach doesn’t eliminate the need for people.  It frees them to devote those extra 99 ½ hours to higher-level analyses and intuitive explorations of patterns in the data.

Now that I’ve got this initial orientation to the set of dreams as a whole, I can look in more detail at particular groups.  First up is gender—what are the male-female patterns in this set of dreams?

Of the 622 participants, 228 were boys and 394 are girls.  It’s a girl-biased sample, which for various reasons is fairly common in dream research.

The boys and girls have similar frequencies on perceptions, with the boys using somewhat more intensity words and the girls having more references to color.  The girls have somewhat more fear, and the boys more happiness.  They are mostly the same on cognition and nature words.  The girls have more family and animal references and more friendliness, while the boys have more physical aggression.  The boys have more references to Christianity, the girls more to death.  (see the table below)

In adulthood, women tend to have higher frequencies than men on many dimensions of dream content and recall, which was mostly the case with this group of children, i.e. the girls were higher than the boys on many categories.

The biggest exception is the higher physical aggression among the boys, which fits with previous studies of gender differences in dream content.  If confirmed by other studies of children’s dreams, this finding would indicate that a gender disparity in aggressive dreaming appears very early in psychological development.

More unexpectedly, the boys had a higher frequency of happiness in their dreams.  If the continuity hypothesis applies here, does it mean boys are happier in general than girls?  I’ll have to look at the dream narratives in more detail to see what that might be about.

Part Five:From numbers to narrative