Do Men's and Women's Experiences of Sexual Harassment Differ? An Examination of the Differential Test Functioning of the Sexual Experiences Questionnaire

Abstract

The Sexual Experiences Questionnaire (SEQ; Fitzgerald, Gelfand, & Drasgow, 1995 Fitzgerald, L. F., Gelfand, M. J., & Drasgow, F. (1995). Measuring sexual harassment: Theoretical and psychometric analysis. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 17, 425–445.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Fitzgerald et al., 1988 Fitzgerald, L. F., Shullman, S., Bailey, N., Richards, M., Swecker, J., Gold, A., Ormerod, A. J., & Weitzman, L. (1988). The incidence and dimensions of sexual harassment in academia and the workplace. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 32, 152–175.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) was originally developed to assess women's experiences of sexual harassment. It was subsequently modified for use by the armed services for inclusion in the gender issues survey (U.S. Department of Defense [DoD], 1995 U.S. Department of Defense. (1995). Status of the Armed Forces Survey: 1995 Form B–Gender Issues (Survey No. 95-001b). Arlington, VA: Defense Manpower Data Center. [Google Scholar]); the revised version is called the SEQ—DoD. In this article, we investigate whether the SEQ can be used to assess men's experiences of sexual harassment. To this end, a newly developed item response theory (Hulin, Drasgow, & Parsons, 1983 Drasgow, F., & Parsons, C. K. (1983). Applications of unidimensional item response theory models to multidimensional data. Applied Psychological Measurement, 11, 59–79.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) procedure, the differential test functioning (Raju, van der Linden, & Fleer, 1995 Raju, N. S., van der Linden, W. J., & Fleer, P. F. (1995). IRT-based internal measures of differential functioning of items and tests. Applied Psychological Measurement, 19, 353–368.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) analysis, was used to examine the measurement equivalence of the SEQ—DoD across men and women. Results indicated that the SEQ—DoD did not function equivalently across men and women. The differential test functioning analysis did indicate, however, that the SEQ—DoD would provide equivalent measurement across men and women if 4 of the items that focused on a sexist environment (e.g., “Treated you ‘differently' because of your sex”) were removed. The implications of these findings for the measurement of sexual harassment across men and women are discussed.

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