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Brian D. Doss and J. Roy Hopkins2 St. Mary's College of Maryland
The Multicultural Masculinity Ideology Scale (MMIS) measures an individual's adaptation and internalization of a culture's norms about how men should act. This study extends previous research on masculinity ideology by generating a scale representing multiple cultural perspectives using 190 Chilean, 283 Anglo-American, and 296 African-American undergraduates. The psychometric properties of the MMIS were established using principal components analysis, convergent validity tests, and internal-consistency and test-retest reliability. Two components consistent across cultures emerged: Hypermasculine Posturing and Achievement. In addition, there were culturally-specific components: Toughness, Pose, and Responsibility among Chileans; Sensitivity among Anglo-Americans; and Sexual Responsibility among African-Americans. Results indicate that the MMIS can be useful for examining a variety of research questions relating to culture and masculinity
Masculinity, originally conceived as a dimension opposite to femininity (see Constantinople, 1973) and later as a personality characteristic separate from yet related to femininity (e.g., Bem, 1974), is conceptualized by the majority of contemporary social psychologists in a prescriptive and genderspecific fashion. Prescriptive (or norm-based) masculinity ideology differs from trait masculinity in that a man is considered masculine if he believes that men should behave in ways thought to embody male role norms in his culture, whether he himself actually does or not. In the trait conceptualization of masculinity, on the other hand (e.g., Bem, 1974; Helgeson, 1994), a man is considered masculine only if he possesses the characteristics of culturally constructed expectations about behavior appropriate for men (Levant et al., 1992; Thompson, Pleck, & Ferrera, 1992). Gender-specific masculinity ideology differs from gender-comparative masculinity in that the latter focuses on characteristics that differentiate the sexes. Genderspecific masculinity ideology examines items that best characterize men, regardless of a scale's ability to differentiate between men and women (Levant et al., 1992). This modification comes, in part, as a result of empirical evidence that masculinity ideology is related to but different from gender relations, attitudes towards women (Pleck, Sonenstein, & Ku, 1994; Thompson & Pleck, 1986), and masculine and feminine traits (Thompson, 1990).
This fundamental shift in research has prompted researchers to divide the construct of masculinity into male role norms and masculinity ideology (Pleck, Sonenstein & Ku, 1993) to reflect its reconceptualization. Male role norms are culturally...