The social roles questionnaire: A new approach to measuring attitudes toward gender

Abstract

Innovative research is constrained by instruments that assume gender to be captured by dichotomous categories. This article presents the results of two studies that document the psychometric properties of the Social Roles Questionnaire (SRQ), a new measure of gender role attitudes. A social constructivist perspective guided the development of the instrument that was designed not only to capture the diversity in people's thinking about social roles for men and women, but also to identify attitudes that transcend binary categories. The article details the process of assessing reliability and validity based on data from 414 undergraduates. Findings revealed the SRQ is reliable and valid and that women were more likely than men to endorse egalitarian and gender transcendent beliefs. Additional possible uses of the SRQ are discussed. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2006.