EGN NEWS DESK
ABSTRACT
Traditional methods of measuring intercourse and gender – usually by conflating the 2 – have been criticized on empirical and normative grounds. This article presents the outcomes of 15 focus teams carried out in Canada in 2016 that had been motivated by two questions: How do individuals take into consideration gender and the way can this inform or refine present approaches to the measurement of gender? Several patterns emerged. First, members appear to know gender most frequently within the context of gendered roles and duties, with bodily appearances or traits taking part in secondary roles. Second, the salience of gender tends to be highest at dwelling and within the office. Third, ethnicity/race, age, and sexual orientation are, predictably, vital lenses via which people understand and expertise gender. Fourth, focus teams present vital alternatives for reflection on and enchancment of gender measurement in survey analysis, together with the completely different context-dependent components that go into gender id and the necessity for multi-dimensional measures. Taken collectively, findings assist establish tangible practices that could possibly be adopted for enhancing measurement of gender in survey analysis.
1. The challenge was permitted by institutional evaluation boards (IRBs) at Memorial University and Queen’s University, and this challenge complies with related legal guidelines and rules, as beneficial by the APSA “Principles and Guidance for Human Subjects Research” adopted in 2020. Participants learn and signed varieties indicating they had been knowledgeable and consented to collaborating within the focus group.
2. We opted towards video-recording the teams as a result of analysis exhibits that video-recording is just not essentially higher at capturing dynamics and may very well intimidate members or stifle dialogue (Munday Citation2006).
3. This sort of strategy is especially beneficial within the case of focus group analysis because it permits the analysis crew to see how concepts about masculinity and femininity emerged organically in group dialog. This permits the analysis crew to keep away from imparting their very own concepts about what constitutes gender in a top-down method. Rather, the evaluation highlights the underlying themes that naturally take form within the discussions.
4. WordStat permits the researcher to implement particular guidelines for retrieving the suitable use of the phrases you want to assess primarily based on proximity to different phrases or phrases. For instance, in looking for the time period “care” and eager to solely account for situations that seek advice from caring for kids or elders (e.g., versus references akin to “I don’t care”), we had been in a position to implement a rule that may account for the frequency of the time period that excluded the undesirable use primarily based on proximate phrases.
5. It bears noting that a few the main target group dialogue prompts themselves requested about roles, however solely actually within the second a part of Activity 2 and the eleventh immediate of 13 in Activity 3 (Appendix 2). A few the visuals did as properly, akin to the photographs of multitasking dad and mother beneath the heading “Activity 3: Gender and Everyday Life” (Appendix 3). Many of the dialogue prompts had been open-ended and broad and didn’t explicitly point out roles, traits, bodily traits, beliefs, or attitudes to be able to enable teams to steer dialog.
6. We suppose it is a testomony to the significance of rigorously crafting teams and guaranteeing that homogeneity is achieved inside teams, due to the various kinds of conversations that may happen.
7. LBGTQ Health defines Two-Spirit as: “an individual who has each a masculine and a female spirit, and is utilized by some First Nations individuals to explain their sexual, gender and/or religious id. As an umbrella time period, it could embody same-sex attraction and all kinds of gender variance … ” For extra info, see: http://lgbtqhealth.ca/group/two-spirit.php.
