Attitudes toward women's roles and psychological adjustment: A study on the United Arab Emirates female college students.

Author: Al Darmaki, F.R.

Source:
The Sciences & Engineering, Vol 59(8-B), Feb 1999: 4532
The purposes of the current study were to test the replicability of the factor structure of the Attitudes Toward Women's Roles (ATWR), Sex-Role Egalitarianism Scale (SRES), Self-Esteem Scale (SES), Self-Esteem Inventory, Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CES-D) Scale, and Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) with a college student sample from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) society; and to investigate the relationship between attitudes toward women's roles and the two indicators of psychological adjustment: Self-esteem and depression. Participants were 413 female undergraduate students from the UAE University. Subjects completed a packet containing instruments measuring attitudes toward women's roles, self-esteem, depression, and demographic information. Factor analysis was performed to determine the dimensionality of the attitudes toward women's roles scales, self-esteem scales, and depression scales with the UAE female sample; and to compare the findings of this study with those reported in previous research based on samples drawn from other cultures. Correlation coefficients were computed to examine the relationship among the demographic variables, attitudes toward women's roles variables, self-esteem variables and depression variables. A canonical correlation was performed to investigate the relationship between the set of attitudes toward women's roles variables and the set of self-esteem and depression variables. Results indicated that the factor structure of the scales previously reported for samples from other cultures did not fit the data from the female college sample from the Emirates. Mild to moderate and significant correlations were found among the variables under investigation. A small yet significant canonical correlation was found between the set of attitudes toward women's roles variables and the set of psychological adjustment variables. This showed that the Employment Equality and Feminine Roles variables correlated negatively with BDI, Positive View of Self, Self-Appraisal, yet positively with Somatic and Depressed Mood and Negative View of Self variables. The Traditional Roles variable correlated positively with BDI, Positive View of Self, Self-Appraisal, yet negatively with Somatic and Depressed Mood and Negative View of Self variables. However, caution should be rendered in interpreting this result because of the magnitude of the correlation and the complexity of the relationship between these variables. The findings of this study were discussed. Implications and limitations of the study along with recommendations for future research were included in the discussion.