Relationship between sex-role attitudes and personality traits and the revised sex-role behavior scale

Two hundred college men and women completed self-report measures of sex-role traits (Personal Attributes Questionnaire), attitudes (Attitudes Toward Women Scale), and behavior (Sex-Role Behavior Scale). Intercorrelations among the three measures were examined to test two competing theoretical perspectives which dominate sex-role research today. The social learning point-of-view of Janet Spence and her colleagues asserts a general independence of sex-role personality traits, attitudes, and behaviors. The cognitive-developmental theory of Sandra Bem asserts that sex-role phenomena are fairly closely interrelated, at least for sex-typed individuals whose gender schemas cause them to adhere closely to traditional sex-role norms in their self-concepts and behavior. Findings of moderate relationships between masculine, feminine, and sex-specific personality traits, and the corresponding interest/behavior scales of the Sex-Role Behavior Scale, and between sex-role attitudes and behaviors lend partial support to both perspectives.     

Parental relationships,socioeconomic status,and sex-role expectations

The responses of university women to a scale composed of items reflective of traditional expectations for females are examined. Women who reject such stereotyped expectations had poor childhood relationships with their fathers, and the women who endorse the expectations had good paternal relationships. This is a class-specific pattern most characteristic of those of lower socioeconomic background. No similar effect was found when childhood relationships with mothers were considered. Implications of fathers' influence on daughters' sex-role orientations are considered.An earlier version of this article was presented as a paper at the meeting of the Pacific Sociological Association in Victoria, British Columbia, April 1975. The patience and ideas of an anonymous reviewer have considerably strengthened this revision. This research was partially supported by NSF Grant ISP-8011449.     

Gender and sex-role appropriateness: Bias in the judgment of disturbed behavior

Male and female undergraduate raters made attributions of mental disorder, personality traits, and diagnostic and treatment judgments for four case studies in which sex of client and sex-role appropriateness of client behavior were manipulated. Significant interactions of sex-role appropriateness with both client sex and rater sex highlighted the significance of sex-role stereotypes in the attribution of mental disorder by nonprofessionals. The data indicated that these cultural sex-role definitions had the strongest negative effect for females and the female sex role. Implications of these findings for the clinical judgment process and female self-perception are discussed.The order of authorship was determined by random selection.     

Opinions of typical female and male sex-role behavior in Swedish children

The purpose of the study was to measure the opinions of typical female and male sex-role behavior in Swedish children. Sixty-two adults aged 20–30 years participated in a study designed to develop a method for the measuring of these opinions. In the main study, 515 children between the ages of three and twelve participated. The results showed that from the age of three, Swedish children share opinions about typical female and male sex-role behavior with adults to a large extent, and this became more pronounced with increasing age. The study also showed that the reliability of the method used was satisfactory. Factor analyses gave two orthogonal factors identified as a femininity factory and a masculinity factor, indicating that the validity also could be considered satisfactory.     

Conception and self-attribution of sex-role behavior: A cross-cultural comparison between Swedish and kibbutz-raised lsraelian children

The conception of typical female and male sex-role behavior and self-attribution of sex-role behavior in Swedish children were compared to conception and self-attribution in kibbutz-raised Israelian children. Two hundred and fourteen Swedish children aged 7–8 years and 68 Swedish and 56 Israelian children aged 10–12 years participated. It was hypothesised that Swedish children would be more traditional regarding sex-role behavior both with respect to their conception and to their self-attribution than the kibbutz-raised Israelian children since the strive for equality between the sexes, according to the kibbutz ideology, has been more pronounced in Israel than in Sweden. The results did not confirm the hypothesis. No cultural difference was found neither with respect to conception of typical female and male sex-role behavior, nor to the proportion of traditional and androgynous sex-typing regarding self-attribution.     

Cultural sex-role expectations and children's sex-role concepts

Middle-class children between the ages of 4 and 8 were interviewed about their sex-role attitudes, in order to determine the extent to which recently changing cultural mores have influenced children's sex-role concepts. The children were asked about their career goals; the careers they would choose if they were the opposite sex; the reasons why they like being a boy or girl; and their opinions regarding the appropriateness of men and women participating in 14 sex-stereotypic occupations and activities. The children's parents provided demographic information. The children expressed very nonstereotypic attitudes towards the 14 occupations and activities, compared to children in recent studies; but they chose very traditional careers for their own choices and opposite-sex career choices, and often gave stereotypic reasons for preferring their own sex. Parents' education, mothers' employment status, fathers' nontraditional careers, and the children's gender predict responses to several of the sex-role-related questions. Implications for research are discussed.     

A recruitment theory of simple behavior

A statistical theory of choice is developed using a sequential sampling assumption. Response latency distributions for certain simple reaction-time situations are derived and tested. Both response probability and response latency measures are developed for a two-alternative judgment situation and the relationship between the two measures explored. The sampling parameter is proposed as a means of representing incentive conditions in choice situations and ROC curves are obtained by appropriate manipulations of this parameter. A solution to the overlap problem in simple discrimination-learning situations is also derived.This research was supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation. The writer has benefited from discussions with his students, James R. Erickson, James G. Greeno, Duane R. Martin, Kirk H. Smith, and Charles F. Stroebel. For generous suggestions with regard to certain mathematical matters, the writer is indebted to Professors Ingram Olkin, Stephen Orey, and Milton Sobel of the Statistics Department at the University of Minnesota.     

'Fear of success' imagery as a reaction to sex-role inappropriate behavior

Cue effects on TAT imagery, often considered evidence of fear of success, were examined. The cue generally used to assess this motive (Horner, 1968) was modified to depict success in an occupation traditionally considered appropriate for females (ballet). This new cue and Horner's original "medical student"cue produced very different results in fear of success imagery, the modified cue eliciting significantly less of this imagery from females and more from males. A substantial portion of what has been interpreted as "fear of success" imagery appears to involve anxiety about engaging in achievement activities that have traditionally been considered inappropriate to one's sex-role. The implications of this finding for female achievement conflict are discussed.     

Homosexual and heterosexual sex-role orientation on six sex-role scales

A comparison was made of the sex roles of homosexual and heterosexual men and women on the Bem Sex Role Inventory, Personality Attributes Questionnaire, Personality Research Form Androgyny Scale, Adjective Checklist Masculinity and Femininity Scales, Extended Personality Attributes Questionnaire and Undesirable Characteristics Scale. The results indicated that homosexuals and heterosexuals differ in their response to different aspects of sex roles. The most consistent difference was the greater femininity of male homosexuals in respect to male heterosexuals. Other differences were scale-specific and the low interscale comparability indicated such scales should not be used interchangeably. Differences between results of studies comparing sex roles of the homosexuals and heterosexuals appear attributable to sample heterogeneity and distinctions between sex-role scales.     

Sex, sex-role identification, and awareness of sex-role stereotypes

An experiment was run to determine if androgynous people have transcended traditional sex roles or merely incorporated both sex roles into their repertoire. Masculine sex-typed, feminine sex-typed, and androgynous people listed as many masculine and feminine stereotypes as they could think of in a time-limited task. Highly sex-typed individuals showed more awareness of their own sex's attributes than the other sex's stereotypes. Androgynous people showed greater awareness of both sexes' attributes as compared with sex-typed people, indicating support for the incorporation hypothesis rather than the transcendance hypothesis. However, the stereotypes androgynous people listed were somewhat less evaluative in tone compared with those of sex-typed people, Overall, subjects listed more stereotypes of females than males, and female stereotypes were more negative than male stereotypes.     

The relationship of sex-role orientation to self-perceived health status in middle-aged males

The purpose of this study was to determine how sex-role orientation was related to self-perceived health status among a group of middle-aged males. A nonprobability sample of 237 male volunteers between the ages of 40 and 59, of whom 88.7% were engaged in professional occupations, completed the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) and two separate measures employed to assess self-perceived health status. As predicted, the results indicated that on both measures of self-perceived health status, the middle-aged men with a traditional male sex-role orientation or those in the masculine classification reported lower self-perceived levels of health than did males considered to be androgynous. In this sample of professional middle-aged males, an androgynous sex-role orientation was, therefore, associated with higher levels of self-perceived health than was a traditional male sex-role orientation. Finally, an unhypothesized finding was that the men in the undifferentiated category also evidenced lower levels of self-perceived health than males who were androgynous.This research was part of a doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Maryland, College Park.     

Measures of play behavior: The influence of sex-role stereotyped children's books

Preschool children significantly more often chose a sex-stereotypic toy following exposure to a sex-stereotypic children's book. Conversely, boys and girls exposed to a nonstereotypic book significantly more often selected a nonstereotypic toy. Boys and girls individually played with stereotypic male, female, and neutral toys; each child was then read a sex-role stereotypic or nonstereotypic picture book; another play session followed. Measures of visual regard and manipulation were applied to the observed play behavior of 32 preschool children to determine the significance of the findings.     

A comparison of two sex-role androgyny measures in a study of sex-role identity for incarcerated delinquent and nondelinquent females

A sample of 100 incarcerated delinquent females and 100 nondelinquent female matched for age and socioeconomic status were compared on three aspects of sex-role identity. The Bem Sex-Role Inventory and the PRF ANDRO scale were used to assess sex-role androgyny; the Traditional Family Ideology scale was used to assess sex-role attitudes; and several questions concerning heterosexual relationships were asked. Correspondence between the two androgyny measures was moderate at the interval level of measurement and poor at the nominal level. Repeat offenders were significantly higher than first-time offenders and nondelinquents on the BSRI masculine scale; a significantly higher percentage of repeat offenders were classified as androgynous by the BSRI. No differences were observed using the PRF ANDRO scales. Heterosexual relationships were more important in the lives of delinquent females on both friendship and helping dimensions.     

Social skills and sex-role functioning in borderline personality disorder: relationship to self-mutilating behavior

This study compared the social skills functioning and sex role affiliation of female inpatients diagnosed with borderline personality disorder who engaged in self-mutilating behavior (n = 30) with female patients with borderline personality disorder who did not engage in such behavior (n = 18). Patients with borderline personality disorder who engaged in self-mutilating behavior were found to have relatively poorer skills in communicating non-verbal emotional information to others and in receiving and interpreting such information from others. In terms of sex role orientation, patients who engaged in self-mutilating behavior were significantly more likely than non-mutilators to be typed as undifferentiated using the Bem Sex Role Inventory. These participants were less likely to identify with either masculine or feminine sex roles. Patients who did not self-mutilate were found to be significantly more likely than those who did self-mutilate to identify with the masculine sex role.     

Southern traditionalism and sex-role ideology: A research note

Sociological literature, as well as popular folklore, suggests the existence of a Southern regional subculture, of which sex-role traditionalism is an integral part. To test the empirical validity of this assumption, the present study employed the 1975 National Fertility Study data, a probability sample of 3,403 currently married white women, of whom eight sex-role questions were asked. A factor analysis of these questions was used to calculate a sex-role summary score for each respondent. Wife's employment in 1975 and her attainment of high levels of education were the two strongest predictors of a nontraditional sex-role score. The sex-role attitudes of Southern and non-Southern women did not differ significantly. The implications for research and policy are discussed.An earlier version of this article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Atlanta, Georgia, April 4–7, 1979. This project was supported by the Center for the Study of Population and Natural Resources at Michigan State University and by Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station Project No. 3243 S. This report is Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station Journal Article Number 11107. The authors thank Merwyn R. Nelson and an anonymous reviewer for constructive comments on an earlier draft.     

Measuring sex-role stereotypes: Attitudes among Hong Kong Chinese adolescents and the development of the Chinese sex-role inventory

A cross-cultural study of adolescent sex-role stereotypes illustrates possible methodological solutions to problems in measuring sex-role identification. A study was conducted with a sample of Hong Kong Chinese adolescents to develop a rating scale that would (1) define the sex-role stereotypes held by adolescents in Hong Kong and (2) serve as a measure of identification with sex-role stereotypes valid for use with Hong Kong samples. The Chinese Sex-Role Inventory (CSRI) was constructed, therefore, following the procedures of Bem in the creation of the Bem Sex Role Inventory. Creation of the CSRI illustrates the feasibility and value of using such procedures in research with adolescents in any society.This report is based on a doctoral dissertation submitted to the faculty of Harvard University. The research was supported by a National Research Service Award, National Institutes of Health Grant 5-T32-MH14088, awarded to Beatrice and John Whiting to support graduate research in cross-cultural child development.     

Television viewing and the learning of sex-role stereotypes

This study was designed to determine the relationship between the amount of time children spend watching television and their knowledge of adult sex-role stereotypes. Males and females in grades 1, 3, 5, and 7 who were classified as heavy television viewers (25 or more hours per week) or light viewers (10 or less hours per week) both at the time of the study and 15 months previously were administered the Sex Stereotype Measure, an instrument designed to determine children's awareness of stereotyped sex-role perceptions held by adults. Heavy viewers were found to have more stereotyped perceptions than light viewers. A significant interaction effect indicated that among low viewers the perception of male stereotypes steadily declines with increasing age; among heavy viewers, stereotypic responses to male items are maintained with increasing age. No comparable interaction effect was obtained for perception of female stereotypes. The role of interaction with live models in breaking down stereotypic perceptions of males is discussed.A modified version of this paper was presented at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Denver, April 1975.