In my study about gender inequalities, I want to add a measure of men's derogation. In a nutshell, I want to assess attitudes towards men and see whether this can be predicted by other factors that I will analyse.
One way of doing this would be by presenting participants with bipolar adjectives and ask them to rate a generic man on each of them. However, I cannot use this in this particular study as I already have a scale with bipolar adjectives in the questionnaire, which could have an impact on subsequent responses, and, most importantly, because there's too much overlap with gender stereotypes.
Does anyone want to share ideas on how to measure attitudes towards men in a different way?
Can you give an example of such attitudes and how you consider to measure them?
Hi Stefano, In addition to a Semantic Differential (bipolar adjectives), you can measure an attitude with a Likert Scale. Less popular but sometimes better ways to measure attitude include Guttman or Thurston Scaling. Like Alexander, I don't feel like I understand what you're trying to measure? Mostly I hear people talk about derogation of the out-group as a behavior going along with stereotyping. ~ Katie
Alexander Osherenko and Katie Madeline Wyndzen thank you both so much for taking interest in my question! It is nice to be supported by more experienced researchers.
To answer your questions, I want to see whether there are differences in the way men are perceived or treated. One thing that would be interesting to look at, for instance, is how stupid is the average man according to the participant.
Since the moment I posted this question, I found two more acceptable ways of measuring what I want to measure, so I will list them here, and hopefully, they will make my point more clear.
One way would be using the same assessment they used in Stephan et al. (2000). They presented participants with a list of evaluative or emotional reactions toward men, which included terms like hostility, superiority, disliking and so on and participants had to indicate the degree to which they felt these reactions to men on a 10-points scale.
Another way would be using Glick and Fiske's subscale of Hostility Towards Men, from the Ambivalence Towards Men Inventory (Glick & Fiske, 1999). This contains items like "Men act like babies when they are sick" or "Men have no morals in what they would do to get sex". To me, this scale tackles the complementary gender stereotypes about men more than it does with hostility per se, but as Madeline pointed out, stereotypes and derogation go hand in hand and it can be difficult to draw a line between them.
Now, I hope I made my point more clear than it was, and please let me know what you think. Thanks again for the responses.
Glick, P., & Fiske, S. T. (1999). The ambivalence toward men inventory: Differentiating hostile and benevolent beliefs about men. Psychology of women quarterly, 23(3), 519-536.
Stephan, C. W., Stephan, W. C., Demitrakis, K. M., Yamada, A. M., & Clason, D. L. (2000). Women's Attitudes Toward Men An Integrated Threat Theory Approach. Psychology of women Quarterly, 24(1), 63-73.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Psychology
- Emotion