"We Are the Woman and We Are the Man": Insights from Focus Group Analysis on How Scholars Should Measure Sex and Gender

By Admin on August 1, 2024

ABSTRACT

Traditional ways of measuring sex and gender – often by conflating the two – have been criticized on empirical and normative grounds. This article presents the results of 15 focus groups conducted in Canada in 2016 that were motivated by two questions: How do people think about gender and how can this inform or refine current approaches to the measurement of gender? Several patterns emerged. First, participants seem to understand gender most often in the context of gendered roles and responsibilities, with physical appearances or traits playing secondary roles. Second, the salience of gender tends to be highest at home and in the workplace. Third, ethnicity/race, age, and sexual orientation are, predictably, important lenses through which individuals perceive and experience gender. Fourth, focus groups provide important opportunities for reflection on and improvement of gender measurement in survey research, including the different context-dependent factors that go into gender identity and the need for multi-dimensional measures. Taken together, findings help identify tangible practices that could be adopted for enhancing measurement of gender in survey research.

1. The project was approved by institutional review boards (IRBs) at Memorial University and Queen's University, and this project complies with relevant laws and regulations, as recommended by the APSA "Principles and Guidance for Human Subjects Research" adopted in 2020. Participants read and signed forms indicating they were informed and consented to participating in the focus group.

2. We opted against video-recording the groups because research shows that video-recording is not necessarily better at capturing dynamics and may actually intimidate participants or stifle discussion (Munday Citation2006).

3. This type of approach is particularly valuable in the case of focus group research as it allows the research team to see how ideas about masculinity and femininity emerged organically in group conversation. This allows the research team to avoid imparting their own ideas about what constitutes gender in a top-down manner. Rather, the analysis highlights the underlying themes that naturally take shape in the discussions.

4. WordStat allows the researcher to implement specific rules for retrieving the appropriate use of the terms you are looking to assess based on proximity to other words or phrases. For example, in searching for the term "care" and wanting to only account for instances that refer to caring for children or elders (e.g., as opposed to references such as "I don't care"), we were able to implement a rule that would account for the frequency of the term that excluded the unwanted use based on proximate terms.

5. It bears noting that a couple of the focus group discussion prompts themselves asked about roles, but only really in the second part of Activity 2 and the 11th prompt of 13 in Activity 3 (Appendix 2). A couple of the visuals did as well, such as the pictures of multitasking dad and mom under the heading "Activity 3: Gender and Everyday Life" (Appendix 3). Many of the discussion prompts were open-ended and broad and did not explicitly mention roles, traits, physical characteristics, beliefs, or attitudes in order to allow groups to steer conversation.

6. We think this is a testament to the importance of carefully crafting groups and ensuring that homogeneity is achieved within groups, because of the different types of conversations that can take place.

7. LBGTQ Health defines Two-Spirit as: "a person who has both a masculine and a feminine spirit, and is used by some First Nations people to describe their sexual, gender and/or spiritual identity. As an umbrella term, it may encompass same-sex attraction and a wide variety of gender variance … " For more information, see: http://lgbtqhealth.ca/community/two-spirit.php.