This appendix outlines the details of the study described in chapter 4. Since a few readers are interested in the nitty-gritty details of the research methods and statistical analyses involved in this type of study, I’ve included them here. If numbers aren’t your thing, then you may want to pass on this section.
Hypothesis
The goal of this study was to assess what impact, if any, sexual harassment training would have on perceptions of female friends. I hypothesized that after viewing sexual harassment training, both men and women would perceive men as emotionally stronger than women. In particular, I predicted that for men and women who watched the sexual harassment training video, female friends would be rated lower in terms of emotional strength than male friends. This effect would be significantly less for those who watched the fire-safety video.
Participants and Procedures
Respondents were 111 students (forty-two men and sixty-nine women) at a state university in California. The sample consisted of students over eighteen years of age who had some full- or part-time employment experience. The mean age was 21.2 years (SD = 2.5), and participants were ethnically diverse, with 43.9 percent identifying as White, 26.3 percent Hispanic, 21.1 percent Asian, 4.4 percent African-American, and 3.5 percent identifying as “other.”
Students volunteered to participate in this study to meet requirements for various courses. (Several psychology courses require students to participate as subjects in research studies.) Upon completion of the survey, students were granted course credit.
The web-based study randomly assigned participants to either the experimental or control conditions. Those in the experimental condition (fifty-two participants) watched a short sample video on sexual harassment training. The video seemed like a well-produced sexual harassment training video, and the company who produced the training video touts that they have tens of thousands of clients, including Fortune 500 companies. The remaining fifty-nine control participants watched a fire-safety video available on YouTube.com.
To disguise the intent of the study, participants were told that its purpose was to evaluate the effectiveness of the video. Participants were then asked to rate the effectiveness of the training, how much they enjoyed the training, and how much they learned from the training. After completing the video and the follow-up questions, participants were given another survey, which, to them, seemed unrelated to the previous one on sexual harassment training. It wouldn’t be unusual for students completing surveys for course credit to be provided surveys for different studies in one sitting, so this most likely was not questioned. Participants were surveyed about their closest male friend and closest female friend. More specifically, they were asked to rate how well certain attributes described this friend.
Measure
Strength: Two items, emotionally strong and fragile (reverse-coded) were summed to assess the emotional strength of the closest male and female friend. Respondents indicated how well each of these attributes described their closest male and female friend on a 7–point scale (1= not at all, 7 = very much). Ratings for close female friends were then subtracted from ratings of close male friends to produce the differential.
Results
In order to examine the effects of the experimental condition and participant gender on ratings of strength of the closest female friend relative to the closest male friend, factorial analysis of variance (ANOVA) was applied. More specifically, a 2 (sexual harassment video or fire-safety video) x 2 (gender of participant) factorial ANOVA was used to examine the strength differential. Results revealed significant main effects with regard to the experimental condition (F (1, 107) = 7.86, p = 0.006). Those who watched the sexual harassment training video were more likely to rate their close female friends lower on strength than their male friends (M = 1.69, SD = 0.44) than were those who watched the fire-safety video (M = 0.001, SD = 0.41). In other words, in the experimental condition, participants rated male friends, on average, 1.69 units higher on emotional strength than women. In the control condition, men were rated only 0.001 higher than women on strength. Results indicated no significant effects (at the p <.05 level) for participant gender nor were there any significant interaction effects. Therefore, there were no gender differences exhibited in the effect of sexual harassment training on perceptions of female strength.
Limitations and Future Research
The sample in this study was comprised of university students, and it is unknown how this study would generalize to older populations. Furthermore, I do not know what aspects of the sexual harassment training video account for the results in this study. Further research should determine whether the mere mention of sexual harassment results in similar results or whether some aspect of the video resulted in the perceptions of weak women. This study was exploratory in nature and should be replicated before any further conclusions can be drawn.