Androgyny and the BSRI

Question 1

What is androgyny?

Answer 1

-A classification based on personality traits that can be seen when someone has high, somewhat balanced levels of both masculinity and femininity.

Question 2

What is the term used to describe someone who has low, balanced levels of masculinity and femininity?

Answer 2

-Undifferentiated

Question 3

What is the BSRI?

Answer 3

• The Bem Sex Role Inventory
• List of 60 traits, equally divided into being masculine, feminine and neutral; an individual is expected to rate themself on a scale of 1-7 for how much/how often they exhibit each trait.
• The user is then supposed to add every first, second and third characteristic and divide by 20 to find their masculinity, femininity and neutrality scores respectively

Question 4

What can be said about the method behind the BSRI?

Answer 4

(+) The traits were picked out of a set of 200 by 50 male and 50 female judges, meaning there was good internal validity when choosing the traits and little researcher bias
(+) The pilot study was repeated with the same students as the original a month later and similar scores were produced, showing there was good test-retest reliability.

(-) However, the fact that the characteristics are in groups of 3 and are always in the same order put together with the fact that the characteristics are all quite stereotypical means that participants could fairly easily gain an understanding of the study, at which point the participant may begin giving disingenuous answers in order to support what the believe about their own gender identity.
(-) This issue would also likely have been increased in the repeated pilot study due to order effects.
(-) It can be said that the characteristics chosen for the BSRI have poor temporal validity as they were decided over 40 years ago when views on gender were much different
(-) Although the judges were equally male and female, all of them were american and so their views on gender were highly westernised and culturally bound, reducing external validity/generalisation.
(-) It is also difficult to get an accurate representation of people through a questionnaire, especially on topics like gender where everything is largely subjective; people may have reasons to lie or may just not know themselves as well as they thought they did- leading to a lower internal validity.