Measuring “gender ideological identity”: Vignettes for young men and women

Authors have noted the difficulty inherent in empirically documenting gender as a personal identity, which is frequently mis-operationalized as an ideology. In this paper I build on the pioneering work of Kroska (2000) and discuss the development of a set of character vignettes to measure “gender ideological identity.” Whereas Kroska's original vignettes were created for middle-age adults already established in marital and parental roles, these vignettes were collaboratively developed using the help of undergraduate sociology students and target a younger audience of men and women in the early stages of family formation. Construct validity of the vignettes is done using data collected from undergraduate students (N = 482) and is followed by a discussion of the findings.