Sex-role Measures Research Articles

Personality and lipid level differences associated with homosexual and bisexual identity in men.

Self-identified homosexual (n = 30), bisexual (n = 29), and heterosexual (n = 31) men were compared on measures of gender-typical behavior, sex role, ego strength, and lipid levels. Homosexual men differed significantly from the heterosexual men on the gender-typical behavior and feminine sex-role measure (both in adulthood and in childhood), and several trends and significant differences were found on the biochemical measures of lipid levels (especially when 7 obese men were removed from the analyses). As a rule, the bisexual men were different from the heterosexual men on the above measures, but were indistinguishable from the homosexual men. Bisexuals differed from both of the other two groups, however, by scoring lower on the ego strength scale and by reporting themselves to be more often troubled, lonely, and depressed. We caution that the lipid analyses were made on single blood samples and require an extended replication; however, we report the data because of their possible theoretical interest and because they replicate work of 20 years ago.

Aggression, sex role measures, and Kohut's psychology of the self

Recent controversies concerning the relationship between aggression and sex role development were evaluated in light of Heinz Kohut's psychoanalytic psychology of the self. Masculinity roughly corresponded to grandiose elements of Kohut's bipolar self while femininity was linked to its idealizing sector. As predicted, self-reported aggressiveness reflected an immature grandiosity; and associations of assertiveness with both masculine and grandiose personality styles supported Kohut's claim that adjustment can evolve out of more aggressive forms of self-functioning. Socially desirable forms of femininity had the advantage of being incompatible with aggressiveness, but they also failed to promote assertiveness. Androgynous, masculine, feminine, and undifferentiated sex roles displayed largely predictable parallels with synthetic, internal, external, and archaic narcissistic styles. As in previous research, therefore, Kohut's theory proved useful in examining the mental health implications of traditional sex roles.

Payoff expectancies between contingent serial moves of victim and aggressor in three hypothetical conflict situations

The expectancies of payoffs in the contingent serial interactive moves between victim and instigator, from the point of view of the victim, were measured for three hypothetical confrontations: someone pushes ahead of you in a movie line; a driver of a car takes a parking space you felt was yours; or you are the object of a rape attempt. These situations differ in urgency, and in the likelihood of success if there is resistance to the instigator. Expectations of persons were elicited as to their response to the particular aggressive act, the counter-response then expected of the instigator of the attack, and the subsequent contingent responses of each of the two persons, victim and instigator, until one or the other withdrew. The results show, in general, different payoffs at each interactive point over the ongoing serial stages in a situation, rather than an overall generalized contingency expectation, with these being different for self and the symbolized other, and also different for the three situations. Personality and sex-role measures showed minimal relation to the expectancies, and then not at the opening of the conflict, and for the instigator's rather than for the victim's expected responses.

Androgyny as synthetic narcissism: Sex role measures and Kohut's psychology of the self

In Kohut's analysis of narcissism, the self emerges as a bipolar structure characterized by grandiosity at one pole and dependency at the other. Through appropriate developmental processes, grandiosity grows into a mature ambitiousness, and early dependencies are converted into a stable system of ideals. The present investigation predicted that sex role constructs essentially measure these two aspects of the self. Expected relationships between masculinity and grandiosity, and between femininity and dependency, were in fact obtained. Based in large part on Westin's (Self and Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) analysis of Kohut's theory, synthetic, internal, external, and archaic narcissistic self styles were hypothesized to exist and to parallel the androgynous, masculine, feminine, and undifferentiated sex roles, respectively. Rough comparabilities were in fact evident between these two typologies. Factor analyses also demonstrated that narcissism and sex role measures load on factors in ways revealing the intimate ties between “pathological” narcissism and the failure to achieve desirable sex role characteristics.

Sex role stereotyping in women with agoraphobia and their husbands

Thirty-two married women with Diagnostic Statistical Manual (3rd edition, revised) diagnosis of agoraphobia and their husbands were compared with 32 matched control women and their husbands on self-report measures of sex role stereotyping, psychological symptoms, personality, and marital adjustment. The experimental women scored significantly lower than the control women on the sex role measure of Autonomy and significantly higher on Intropunitiveness. Significant inverse correlations occurred between women's self-ratings of Masculinity and Autonomy and their agoraphobic symptoms. In the experimental couples, but not the control couples, significant and substantial disagreements occurred on ratings of each other's Masculinity and Autonomy, and husbands' marital satisfaction correlated strongly with wives' self-rating of Femininity. The findings justify further study of sex role stereotyping in agoraphobia, especially where the syndrome coexists with marital dissatisfaction and/or personality disorder.

Self-Esteem and Sex-Role Attitudes: A Comparison of Italian- and Anglo-Australian Adolescent Girls

Two groups of 15-year-old girls, one Italian-Australian (IA, n = 60), and one Anglo-Australian (AA, n = 48), were compared on self-esteem and a wide range of measures associated with sex roles, including sex-role satisfaction, sex-role orientation, and assessment of and attitudes toward sex-role differentiation in the family and the culture. Self-esteem and sex-role satisfaction did not differ in the two groups. Nor were there differences in attitudes toward sex-role differentiation, even though cultural and familial differentiation were greater in the IA group and males were accorded relatively more value. However, the groups did differ in the pattern of variables associated with self-esteem and with these sex-role measures. In the more traditional IA subculture, girls' sex-role attitudes correlated with situational constraints. Unlike the AA girls, self-esteem was, in part, associated with stereotypic feminine attributes and preoccupations, and conformed to the androgyny model of well-being. In the AA group, sex-role attitudes and self-esteem were associated with perceptions of personal qualities valued in the broader, more egalitarian culture, such as intellectual ability and masculinity, thus confirming the masculinity model.

Television, Sex-Role Attitudes, and Sex-Role Behavior

Amount of television viewing, sex-role attitudes, and sex-role behavior were measured at two points in time in a sample of 287 adolescents. The sex-role measures concern respondents' attitudes about the sex-specific appropriateness of various household chores and their own self-reported tendency to perform those chores. The data show that television viewing makes an independent contribution to adolescents' sex-role attitudes over time, but that television is not related to their actual behavior. The relationship between viewing and attitudes, however, is mediated by behavior, but in different directions for boys and girls. Finally, there is a reciprocal relationship between amount of viewing and the degree of congruence between sex-role attitudes and behavior.

Sex role stress and job burnout among family practice physicians

Relationships among sex role stress, gender, and job burnout were explored for 67 family practice physicians in four residency programs. Sex role stress was inferred from physicians' self-descriptions, descriptions of their ideal physician, and discrepancies between real and ideal on the three dimensions of the Personal Attributes Questionnaire. Job burnout was assessed with the emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and lack of accomplishment subscales of the Maslach Burnout Inventory. No gender differences were found on the MBI. On the PAQ, the women viewed themselves as more expressive and sensitive to experiencing hurt feelings than did the men, who saw themselves as more instrumental than did the women. The sexes agreed in describing their ideal physician as more instrumental and expressive than they saw themselves to be. Men fell short of their ideal on expressiveness to a greater degree than did women, whereas women fell short of their ideal on instrumentality and sensitivity to hurt feelings to a greater degree than did men. For both sexes, sex role measures were most strongly related to the accomplishment subscales of MBI.

Contrast of the Gender-Identity Scale with Bem's Sex-Role Measures and the MF Scale of the MMPI

A comparison was made of a recently developed instrument, the Masculine Gender-identity scale of Blanchard and Freund with other measures of sex-role, namely, the mf scale of the MMPI and Bern's (1974) sex-role inventory. Scores for 296 women and 200 men from introductory courses in psychology were minimally correlated. The analysis indicated that the masculine identity scale is an independent measure which has utility contingent upon questions asked about gender-related phenomena.

Psychological androgyny and ego development

Psychological androgyny has often been described as associated with increased behavioral flexibility, with the availability of skills in both traditionally masculine and feminine areas. Ego development has been described as involving an increasing differentiation of one's perception of self, of behavior, and of one's thoughts and feelings, as well as an increasing ability to integrate these differentiated aspects. We therefore predicted that androgynous individuals would show higher levels of ego development than sex-typed individuals, who would in turn be higher than undifferentiated subjects. Eighty-four undergraduate and graduate students completed the Washington University Sentence Completion Test and the Personality Research Form AN-DRO scale. No evidence of a relation between these measures was found. Several other negative findings have recently been reported, using other sex role measures. It appears that ego development, as currently measured, is not associated with sex-related self-concepts, as typically measured, though it may be associated with more androgynous sex role expectations of others, and with self-perceptions of agency and communion. Measures of sex-related self-concepts that provide separate scores for positive and negative attributes should be employed in future studies.

Comparability of Sex-Role Measures

5 current sex-role measures (the Bem Sex-role Inventory, the Personal Attributes Questionnaire, the Personality Research Form Andro Scale, the Masculinity and Femininity scales of the Adjective Checklist, and a set of socially undesirable sex-related characteristics) were compared for three samples. The scales have often been used interchangeably in the past, as they describe sex-role style in similar conceptual and psychometric terms. Yet some doubt had been raised recently as to the comparability of four of the scales for a college sample. The present study confirmed the limited comparability of the five scales in all samples tested (60 college students, 60 married adults, 60 psychiatric patients). The present analysis indicated that with current item content and classification procedure the measures cannot be used interchangeably.

The Effects of Early Parental Divorce on the Sex Role Development of College Students

The present study examined the long term effects of early parental divorce on the sex role development of college students. Two hundred and nineteen undergraduates served as subjects; 84 from families where the parents divorced prior to the subject's tenth birthday, and 135 from families in which the parents had never divorced or separated. While shorter-term studies have indicated disruptions in sex role development in children of divorced parents, the present study failed to support this conclusion. No significant differences were found between subjects from intact and divorced parents on the sex role measures used. Further analysis of the data for subjects from divorced families assessed the possible mediating influence of a)children's age at the time of divorce, b) presence and sex of siblings, and c)post-divorce parental conflict. These factors were found to have an effect on subjects' sex role development.

Adjustment and sex-role orientation in adolescence

The purpose of the present study was to reexamine the relationship between sex-role orientation and self-esteem in adolescence. One hundred and six senior high school students completed the Rosenberg self-esteem measure (Rosenberg, 1965) and two measures of sex-role orientation, the Bem Sex Role Inventory, Short Form (BSRI; Bem, 1981), and the Personal Attributes Questionnaire Short Form (PAQ; Spence et al., 1975). The relationship between sex-role orientation and self-esteem was found to vary depending on the sex-role measure employed. Results of the BSRI revealed that androgynous individuals had higher levels of self-esteem than masculine, feminine, and undifferentiated adolescents. PAQ results indicated that androgynous individuals had higher levels of self-esteem than feminine and undifferentiated individuals. When the independent contributions of masculinity and femininity were assessed, both BSRI and PAQ masculinity and femininity significantly predicted self-esteem. Analyses also revealed that the effects of sex-role orientation on self-esteem varied by sex across both the BSRI and PAQ. Implications of the present findings for previous work on sex-role development in adolescence are discussed.

Cross-Validation of Sex-Role Measures for Children with Correlation of Sex-Role Measures for Children and Parents

Second-grade children (21 boys, 14 girls) and both parents from intact, middle-class, at least second generation U.S. citizenship homes responded to measures of sex-role adoption, concepts, and preference. Classroom teachers rated children's sex-role adoption. Both adults and children had clear sex differences on means of measures of sex-role preference and adoption. Boys and girls showed close agreement as to the stereotypic sex-role concepts with little overlap between the distributions of concept scores characterizing boys and girls. Parents tended to adjust their preferences toward those more stereotypic for the sex of their child. The sex-role adoption by children tended to be positively correlated with the sex-role adoption by their mothers. Girls also had such correlations between their sex-role adoption and father's sex-role preference and stereotypic sex-role concepts.

Assessing Educational Equity With Sex Role Measures

Assessing Educational Equity With Sex Role Measures

Problem-solving performance of young boys and girls as a function of task appropriateness and sex identity

The problem-solving performance of young boys and girls was examined in three conditions in which good performance was indicated as being appropriate for boys, for girls, or for both boys and girls. The relations between task scores and five sex-role measures were also examined. As predicted, the boys performed significantly more poorly when the task was indicated as one that girls did better. The girls' performance was not affected by the conditions of the study. The girls' problem-solving scores did not differ significantly from the boys' scores. There was some relationship between the task scores and the sex-role measures for boys, but not for girls. Associations among the sex-role measures were not high.

Differential Effectiveness of Two Classification Procedures on the Bem Sex Role Inventory

Two procedures-a simple median split and a difference/median split method-were used to classify 102 male and 129 female college students into masculine, feminine, androgynous, and undifferentiated sex role orientations on the basis of their Bern Sex Role Inventory scores. Differences in classification occurred among nearly one-third of the subjects, and as expected, the difference/median split procedure was more successful in predicting sex-role ideology. Using this procedure, masculine-typed females were found to be most profeminist in their attitudes, while low masculinity females were most conservative. No significant differences were obtained for the male groups using either procedure. Future research with the BSRI and related sex-role measures should employ similar comparisons to determine the relative validity of the two procedures.