1973 | JANET T. SPENCE, ROBERT HELMREICH and JOY STAPP
The article presents a 25-item short version of the Attitudes toward Women Scale (AWS), originally developed by Spence and Helmreich in 1972. The short form was designed to be highly correlated with the full 55-item version, which measures attitudes toward women's rights and roles in various areas such as education, employment, and relationships. The selection of items for the short form was based on item analysis, where the most discriminatory items were chosen from each quartile group of male and female students. The short form showed high correlations (0.95 or above) with the full scale for both male and female students and their parents. Factor analysis confirmed the unifactorial nature of the scale, with the first factor explaining a significant portion of the variance for both groups. Normative data for the student and parent samples were also provided, showing that female students and mothers had more liberal attitudes than male students and fathers.The article presents a 25-item short version of the Attitudes toward Women Scale (AWS), originally developed by Spence and Helmreich in 1972. The short form was designed to be highly correlated with the full 55-item version, which measures attitudes toward women's rights and roles in various areas such as education, employment, and relationships. The selection of items for the short form was based on item analysis, where the most discriminatory items were chosen from each quartile group of male and female students. The short form showed high correlations (0.95 or above) with the full scale for both male and female students and their parents. Factor analysis confirmed the unifactorial nature of the scale, with the first factor explaining a significant portion of the variance for both groups. Normative data for the student and parent samples were also provided, showing that female students and mothers had more liberal attitudes than male students and fathers.