Measuring “gender ideological identity”: Vignettes for young men and women

Abstract

Authors have noted the difficulty inherent in empirically documenting gender as a personal identity, which is frequently mis-operationalized as an ideology. In this paper I build on the pioneering work of Kroska (2000) and discuss the development of a set of character vignettes to measure “gender ideological identity.” Whereas Kroska's original vignettes were created for middle-age adults already established in marital and parental roles, these vignettes were collaboratively developed using the help of undergraduate sociology students and target a younger audience of men and women in the early stages of family formation. Construct validity of the vignettes is done using data collected from undergraduate students (N = 482) and is followed by a discussion of the findings.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the students enrolled in the two undergraduate family sociology courses for their work constructing the gender vignettes, graduate student Jessica Behm for her help in the early stages of refining the vignettes, and undergraduate student Sara Satter for coding and entering the survey data. I am also grateful for audience comments on this work, which was presented in earlier form at the Midwest Sociological Society meetings in 2007.