Androgyny

• Androgyny is defined as displaying strong traits of masculine and feminine characteristics in your personality and behaviour.
• BSRI MODEL

  • Sandra Bem developed a way to measure androgyny and how people conform to sex role stereotypes.
  • Bem gave 100 students a list of personality traits. She had 50 choose traits that were desirable for men and 50 choose traits desirable for women. Bem then chose 20 traits that everyone agreed were desirable for men and another 20 for women. Bem also chose 20 gender neutral traits.
  • The following 60 traits were used in a questionnaire where people would rate themselves from a scale of 1-7 for how well they represent that trait. The responses assigned them to 1 of 4 quadrants: feminine, masculine, androgynous, and undifferentiated.
• • Sandra Bem states that theirs a link between psychological well-being and being androgynous.
  • This hypothesis was then confirmed by Flaherty and Dusik who conducted a study on the link between androgyny and psychological well-being. Results showed that people who are androgynous, according to the BSRI, tend to have better psychological well-being then those who are not.
• A03 BSRI

  Strength) BSRI has high external reliability

  The scale was developed using 50 male and 50 female judges who rated traits in terms of how well they represented masculinity and femininity. The actual BSRI was conducted using 1000 students and the results generally showed that their scores aligned with their gender identity.

  -> The test was done again a month later and found similar results, which established test-retest reliability.
• A03 BSRI

  Limitation) People may not have insight into their degree of masculinity or femininity because "gender" is a social construct that's open to interpretation. Also, the scoring system is subjective, and people's applications of the point scale will differ.

  -> This suggests the BSRI may not be an objective, scientific way of assessing androgyny.

  
  

  Strength) Using the split-half method, researchers have found that the two halves of the BSRI gave similar results, meaning that the test has high internal reliability.