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“Different Dialects”: examining masculine and feminine honor across gender and ethnicity in an american context

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Abstract

The psychological study of honor is predicated on hitherto-unexamined assumptions that gendered facets of honor culture meaningfully exists across groups. It is assumed that both males and females, despite having different normative and contextual concerns, share the same concepts of their own and the other genders honor. It is further assumed that honor’s gendered facets can be meaningfully assumed to exist across cultural and geographic groups. However, paradoxically, honor within an American context is studied in a primarily white context based on historical Scots-Irish immigration patterns, and most common measures of honor draw from this. The present paper examines honor’s existence across both gender and ethnicity-based contexts using factorial invariance testing. Two established measures of honor ideology – the Honor Ideology for Manhood (HIM) and the Honor Ideology for Womanhood (HIW) scales – were evaluated for their ability to meaningfully represent the same latent construct of honor across these contexts. Results indicated that the HIM should be re-conceptualized and reorganized into an updated scale, the HIM-R, representing the distinct facets of reputation and retaliation-based concerns for masculine honor. The HIW achieved meaningful invariance across gender groups. Both the HIW and the reconceptualized HIM-R achieved meaningful invariance across ethnicity-based contexts. The implications of these findings for honor research in American contexts is discussed.

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Data Availability

all data and material are available upon request from the corresponding author. The primary materials are included as supplementary material, and correlational data for replication is also included in supplemental material.

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All code is available upon request from the corresponding author.

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  1. University of St. Thomas, Houston, TX, USA

    Aaron Pomerantz

  2. Arizona Early Childhood Development and Health Board, Arizona, USA

    Kevin Green

  3. The University of Oklahoma, Norman, USA

    Duncan McCollum & Hairong Song

  4. Rice University, Houston, TX, USA

    Ryan P. Brown

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Pomerantz, A., Green, K., McCollum, D. et al. “Different Dialects”: examining masculine and feminine honor across gender and ethnicity in an american context. Curr Psychol 42, 22623–22636 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03328-z

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