17633. A CONTENT ANALYSIS STUDY OF GENDER ROLE PORTRAYALS IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE. This paper presents a study exploring the changes (or lack thereof) in gender role portrayal and stereotyping in children’s literature, with particular attention to gender asymmetries. A content analysis methodology was used to explore a sample of children’s books originally published prior to 1970 with a sample of children’s books published after 1990. The study sample consisted of five male-character-oriented and five female-character-oriented books (total sample = 20) from each time period. The study tested three hypothesis: 1) Females are more often portrayed in non-traditional roles in the post-1990 literature than in the pre-1970 literature; 2) Females are more frequently depicted in non-traditional roles in the post-1990 literature than male characters; and 3) There appears to be little change in the gender role depictions of male characters between the pre-1970 and post-1980 literature samples. Strong support was found for all three hypotheses. Included in the study write-up are twenty (one for each book) content analysis coding sheets specifying dependent and independent variables and gender role coding for each book analyzed. KEYWORDS: gender roles female characters male characters. APA Style. 26 pages, 32 footnotes, 27 bibliographic sources.