The social culture of fraternities is stereotypically associated with partying, the hook-up culture and bro bonding. The hook-up culture is centered on non-committal, causal, sexual relations. Based on my perception that men in fraternities are partaking in this hook-up culture lifestyle, that promotes having sex with as many female women as possible, I theorized that this cultural experience would shape men to have more sexist attitudes towards women. In addition to the hook-up culture, the many misogynistic party names that fraternities frequently use, such as CEOs and Corporate Hoes also perpetuate the belief that men are superior to women. However I hypothesize men in relationships will have more feminist attitudes because their girlfriends had shaped them to see women as more valuable, and because they are most likely not partaking in the hookup culture. Then for our experimental manipulation we had the two versions of questionnaires to assess level of sexism. The first version had matter of fact statements about women as compared to men. The second version was a subtle story version, with peoples names and real life examples corresponding to the same statements in version one of the questionnaires. My partner and hypothesized there would be no significant difference in overall level of sexism between the two questionnaires, because each statement was getting at the same feminism issue but in a different way.
I have reason to believe that my hypothesis that men in fraternities are in fact more sexist is true despite the fact the results of my study did not support this, because previous literature supports my theory. My study may not have mirrored the results of previous research because of limitations of my survey, such as a small sample size. An example of literature that supports my theory is Sorority and Fraternity Membership and Religious Behaviors: Relation to Gender Attitudes by Dianne Robinson, Gina Gibson Beverly and Jonathan Schwartz. The purpose of the report, was to examine the relationship between S/F status, gender attitudes, and religious behaviors (i.e., attendance in a place of worship and frequency of prayer). (Robinson, Gibson-Beverly &Schwartz, 872) Data was collected from a convenience sample of 297 male and female undergraduate students at a midsized southern university. Each participant was given three surveys; gender attitudes, social desirability, and demographics. They used counterbalancing so that any affects from the order the survey was taken, could be canceled out. To measure Gender attitudes they used the Gender Attitude Inventory, which is a 109-item self-report to assess feelings about sex and gender. Social desirability was measured with the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding which is a 40-item self-report measure that assesses two types of socially desirable responding: Self Deception Enhancement (SDE; 20 items) and Impression Management (IM; 20 items). (Robinson, Gibson-Beverly &Schwartz, 873) Lastly, the demographics were measure in a standard survey. It was found that fraternity members, compared to sorority and non-S/F members, held more stereotypical gender attitudes. Specifically, the results suggest that fraternity members tend to accept stereotypical beliefs about women and male heterosexual violence towards women; endorse casual sex by women; reject womens political leadership; oppose womens rights; and believe in differential work roles.(Robinson, Gibson-Beverly &Schwartz, 871) Such findings are relevant to and in support of our hypothesis that men in fraternities are more sexist than men who are not in fraternities.
Another report that mirrors my investigative question of feminism/sexism and fraternity membership is Fraternity Membership, the display of degrading Sexual Images of Women, and Rape Myth Acceptance by Timothy Bleecker and Sara K. Murnen. The purpose of this study was to learn more about the association between fraternity membership and attitudes and behaviors associated with sexual aggression against women. (Bleecker & Murnen, 487) This experiment had a sample of 60 men total, 30 fraternity members, and 30 non-fraternity members from a mid-western liberal arts college ages ranging from 19 to 23. The male experimenter, with permission of the participant took pictures of their room to see the pictures of women displayed. The participants were also given Lottes (198) 20-item rape supportive attitude scale to assess whether men believed in various rape myths. At the end of the survey they were given demographic questions to disguise their interest in fraternity membership. At the end the participants were debriefed. The experiment found their hypothesis to be true, that fraternity men, would have more images of women in their rooms than would non-fraternity men, that the fraternity mens images would be more degrading, and that the degree of degradation in the images would be positively correlated with stronger beliefs in rape myths held by men. (Bleecker & Murnen, 490) These findings could also be expanded to imply that men in fraternities objectify women more and therefore more sexist. In other words, the notion that non-fraternity members have more positive attitudes towards women could be supported in this articles findings because they are far less likely to buy into rape myths and display women in a degrading way.
Participants
My partner and I surveyed a total of 80 undergraduate men, 40 each, from the Boston area. 33 of which were in a fraternity currently or in the past. 38 of the 80 were currently in a relationship. We excluded females.
Materials
We used the same script on all of our participants before our survey was administered. We said, Excuse me, I am in a psychology class and we are doing a study on social attitudes. Can you help me out for just a couple of minutes? If they asked what was involved we said it is about attitudes towards women. Then we asked if they were an undergraduate college student, if they said yes we told them, Please fill out this completely anonymous questionnaire. Instructions are on the top. Do you have any questions?
Our study had two experimental conditions. The conditions consisted of two versions of a feminism questionnaire. Both conditions had the same four questions on the back regarding relationship status and fraternity membership. On the backside of the questionnaire, we asked:
1.Are you currently in a relationship? For how long?
2.Have you been in a relationship in the past? For how long?
3.Are you currently in Fraternity? For how long?
4.Have you ever been in a Fraternity? For how long?
We made sure this set of questions was attached to the back of either version questionnaire so that participants wouldnt see it until after they completed the feminism questionnaire and therefore wouldnt be clued into the purpose of the study and perhaps unintentionally bias their results.
Both versions 1 and 2 of our feminism questionnaire consisted of 10 statements in which the participants responses were measured on a scale of 1 to 9 (1=very strongly disagree and 9=very strongly agree). For version 1 we pulled, and in some cases slightly altered, 10 of the 27 statements used from the Feminism Scale, also known as FEM Scale created by Eliot Smith, Myra Ferree, and Frederick Miller. An example of one of the statements we included is, Profanity sounds generally worse coming from a women. The second version consisted of an altered, more story like version of all of the 10 questions from the first version. For example on this questionnaire we said, Tina and Bob are twins. Bob constantly gets away with swearing but when Tina swears her parents highly d
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