Using egalitarian items to measure men's and women's family roles

This study was designed to show that measuring gender ideology by egalitarian items might be problematic, as gender egalitarianism is not simply the reverse of gender traditionalism and includes very different stances. Egalitarian items are likely to lead to an insufficient discrimination between traditional and non-traditional respondents. While the former often ignore the egalitarian stance, the latter hold different egalitarian positions which prevents agreement with any specific item. Empirical evidence is reported from quantitative and qualitative data: an international survey based on random samples (n=5.692) and a cognitive study, which was conducted in Germany by both internet (n=889) and telephone (n=285). Here, the selection of a response category was analyzed by using probing questions.