African, Asian, Latina/o, and European Americans' Responses to Popular Measures of Sexist Beliefs: Some Cautionary Notes

The validity and internal reliability for scores on four popular measures of sexist beliefs (the Modern Sexism scale, the Attitudes Toward Women scale, and the Benevolent and Hostile Sexism subscales of the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory; collected from 1994 to 1999 with college students) were tested across four U.S. ethnic groups: 174 African American, 357 Asian American, 147 Latina/o American, and 5,629 European American participants. With some caveats, results from internal reliability, correlations among the measures, and mean endorsement indicated that these measures are suitable across the four ethnic groups examined. Caveats are that the Modern Sexism scale may not be a subtle measure of sexist beliefs in African American populations, and the Benevolent Sexism scale may not be adequate for Latina/o and African American participants. Ethnic group differences emerged in mean responses to these two measures. Taken together, these findings aid researchers in the more efficient and accurate usage of these popular measures of sexist beliefs, particularly with African American, Asian American, and Latina/o American respondents.