engleski

Development and validation of gender stereotype attitude measure for students

Researchers argued that gender stereotyped measures have serious measurement issues that may produce confounded results (Beere, 1990 ; Liben & Bigler, 2002 ; Signorella et al., 2003): (1) Some measures assess knowledge of gender stereotypes and not attitudes ; (2) Although masculinity and femininity is not an unidimensional construct, some measures consist of only masculine or only feminine items, instead of both ; (3) Masculine and feminine items are not comparable in regards to degree of cultural stereotyping or their desirability and prestige ; (4) Some measures do not have appropriate gender content for different age groups. The aim of this study was to design and validate an improved measure of gender stereotype attitudes by taking abovementioned limitations into account. Participants in the study were 220 primary and 220 secondary school students from Croatia, ranging from 11 to 18 years old. To construct a measure of gender stereotype attitudes we obtained 32 items of occupational activities (e.g. Install electrical wiring ; Supervise children in a nursery) from the short version of Personal Globe Inventory (Tracey, 2002). We chose PGI items because it is a well-known measure of interests that is validated in different cultures (Darcy, 2005 ; Šverko & Babarović, 2016 ; Tracey, 2002) and its items are evened by prestige and are understandable to different age groups. We changed the scale instructions and descriptors to reflect measurements of gender stereotyped attitudes. Students had to indicate on a five-point Likert scale “who should do these activities”, men, women or both, men and women. The questionnaire was administered to the students in an online form during a regular school day in their computer classrooms. Results show that gender stereotype attitude measure of occupational activities has high reliability and expected factor structure that is stable in boys and girls’ sample as well as in primary and secondary school samples.

gender stereotypes, occupational activities, PGI short, validation

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