Sociocultural Correlates of Permissive Sexual Attitudes: A Test of Reiss's Hypotheses About Sweden and the United States - Statistical Data Included

Journal of Sex Research,  Feb, 2000  by Martin S. Weinberg,  Ilsa Lottes,  Frances M. Shaver

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Religiosity. Two questions employed in prior research (Weinberg & Williams, 1974) were used to measure religiosity. One asked respondents to indicate how important religion was to them (not important at all, not very important, somewhat important, or very important), and another asked about the frequency of their religious attendance in the last 12 months (never, 1-3 times a year, 4-11 times a year, monthly, or weekly or more). For the latter question, the last two frequency possibilities were combined into monthly or more so that both religiosity items would have a 4-point range. The average of these items was used to constitute the composite measure (Cronbach alpha = .81).

Gender egalitarianism. We did not use an established measure of egalitarian gender role attitudes. First, most of these scales were too long to include in the questionnaire. Second, many of them have yielded very little variability, especially for women (e.g., Lottes, 1985, 1991; Lottes & Kuriloff, 1994). In an attempt to rectify these limitations, we designed three items that respondents were asked to respond to in terms of their degree of agreement (strongly agree, agree somewhat, undecided, disagree somewhat, or strongly disagree). Three areas of gender egalitarianism were selected: politics, the workplace, and social situations. Thus, the political item dealt with views about having a woman in their country's highest governmental position: "I would feel totally comfortable having a woman as president/prime minister of my country." The workplace item was: "I would rather have a male boss than a female boss" (reverse scored). The social item was: "I can accept `assertiveness' in women at least to the same extent as I can on the part of men." Because the Cronbach alpha was not high (.47), the items were used individually.(3)

Sexual egalitarianism. As noted above, to measure the dependent variable (permissiveness of sexual attitudes), we used three sets of items requiring respondents to indicate their degree of approval/disapproval of a series of sexual behaviors engaged in by young women in one case and by young men in another. To transform these responses into a measure of sexual egalitarianism, we calculated the difference between each of the three pairs of corresponding women/men items. Each difference was then subtracted from five so that as it increases, the egalitarianism score decreases. The values from the three sets of items were then averaged to create an index of egalitarian sexual attitudes (Cronbach alpha = .67). Naturalistic views. To assess naturalistic views of sexuality, we constructed three items that dealt with areas identified by Reiss or others (e.g., Schwartz, 1993; Weinberg et al., 1995) with regard to Sweden's naturalism. One item dealt with the naturalness of the nude body: "In the family, adult nudity should be hidden from children who are 78 years old" (reverse scored). The second dealt with self-masturbation: "Self-masturbating every day is psychologically abnormal (even if the person has no other sexual outlets)" (reverse scored). The final item related to the naturalness of having a sexual interest in many people: "It is perfectly normal for people to see at least a half-dozen persons in one day they would like to have sex with." As with general gender egalitarianism, respondents answered on a 5-point Likert continuum from strongly agree to strongly disagree. The items were used individually because the Cronbach alpha was not high (.48).