Psychosocial Measures for Asian Americans: Tools for Practice and Research

Description of measure: The BSRI was developed by Sandra Bem in 1974 to measure masculine, feminine and androgynous personality traits among men and women. The BSRI consists of sixty items (20 feminine, 20 masculine and 20 non-gender related items) which describe personality characteristics. Participants rate each item on a 7-point scale on how true each of these characteristics is for them. The manual published in 1978 with some updated information on the BSRI reported internal consistencies between .75 and .90. Testretest reliabilities for the Femininity and Masculinity scales for the original BSRI were .82 and .94 respectively among females and .89 and .76 among males. Although the norms were also provided in the manual, the author recommended creating a sample median on the basis of the sample used for study where a large number of male and female subjects are used. Although there is some criticism regarding the validation of the scale (Bernard, 1980; Pedhazur & Tetenbaum, 1979), the scale has been shown to have a relatively good validity in current American culture (Blanchard-Fields; Harris, 1994; Holt & Ellis, 1998; Suhrer-Roussel & Hertzog, 1994).