You may have noticed in your daily life that some families have all male or all female children. We are interested in learning more about this phenomenon. Specifically, we would like to know whether or not certain individuals might be more likely to have male or female children, and what factors might influence this probability.

Previous work in our lab has shown that pregnant women score differently on certain mental tasks depending on whether they are pregnant with boys or girls. Our new study looks to determine whether these differences are present prior to pregnancy, are also present in fathers, and whether they might be related to the sex of a person’s children.

During the next few months, we will be recruiting as many dentists in BC as possible. We have contacted you as a potential participant given your status as a practicing dentist in the province and wrote the DAT in 1993 or later.

We are contacting dentists because we are interested in the Dental Aptitude Test (DAT) that candidates write prior to admission into dental school.  This test captures the aspect of cognitive ability that we are most interested in, and for most people, will have been written prior to starting a family.

Participation in this study will only take 10-30 minutes of your time from start to finish. We are asking participants to allow us anonymized access to their archived DAT test scores (you won’t be asked to re-take the test), to answer a few personal questions such as the sexes of your children (if any), to complete a psychological questionnaire, and to send a scanned copy of your hand print. Don’t worry – everything is kept strictly confidential and will not be used for any purpose other than academic research. We have been working closely with the Canadian Dental Association (CDA) to facilitate this research as well as to ensure your confidentiality.

There are two ways to participate:

1. 1.Fill out the mail-out package that we sent to you directly in February, 2010. If you have lost this package, please contact us for a new one.
   

2. 2.Participate online using our new survey. Click here to access the survey.