Psychological Androgyny

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Pages: 4

Decades of research into the construct of psychological androgyny, or the degree to which an individual identifies with both masculine and feminine traits, has yielded a multitude of theoretical and empirically-validated causes and consequences of an individual’s felt gender identity. Bem theorized that androgynous individuals are more flexible than their more gender-typed peers because they are able to engage in behavior that is best suited for a particular situation, remaining sensitive to the changes that may be required (1975). Although most studies utilizing the Bem’s measure of androgyny have investigated its correlation with psychological outcomes such as self-esteem, social adjustment, and sex-typed behaviors (Markstrom-Adams, 1989), …show more content…
Method
Participants
Participants included 181 college students (121 female, 60 male) attending a regional university in the Southwest United States. The students ranged in age from 18 to 46 years of age (M = 20.82, SD = 4.83) and were 62.9% white, 12.9% Latino, 9.7% African American, 5.9 % Asian American, and 5.9% who did not specify. More than one half of the participants were underclassmen (freshmen and sophomore classification; n = 113). The sample of students was recruited from a variety of major courses. .
Procedure and Measures
Students who agreed to participate were sent a link to an online survey. Students took an average of 20.6 minutes to complete the survey.
Psychological Masculinity and Femininity. Androgyny was measured using the short-form version of the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI-SF; Bem, 1981). The measure presents a set of 20 items (10 masculine/instrumental, 10 feminine/expressive) for which respondents used a seven point Likert scale to indicate how much they identified with each trait (1 = “Almost never true for me” to 7 = “Almost always true for me.”) We then computed each participant’s average score on the masculinity and femininity items, and an overall androgyny score by averaging across all 20 items (as suggested by Bem,