Surveyed 108 Australian married couples about the effect of sex roles on their marital happiness. Questionnaires included the Bem Sex-Role Inventory and the Dyadic Adjustment Scale. Measures of the sex-role orientation and happiness of each partner with the relationship permitted an evaluation of the similarity and complementarity hypotheses as well as an assessment of the general compatibility of sex-role combinations. Results provide substantial evidence for the importance of femininity in relationships; the happiness of the husband was positively related to the wife's femininity, and the happiness of the wife was positively related to the husband's femininity. Couples in which both partners were high on femininity (androgynous and feminine) were far happier than were couples in which at least one of the partners was low on this dimension. Although similarity of both masculinity and femininity between partners was associated with happiness, the complementarity hypothesis was convincingly refuted in terms of both happiness and choosing a partner. (27 ref)

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The development of two 50‐item parallel forms of an Australian sex‐role scale is described. A total of 2,427 subjects rated 512 adjectives in terms of their desirability for Australian males and females, the degree to which they are expected in Australian males and females, and their self‐applicability. These ratings were used to construct the two scales — Personal Description Questionnaire Forms A and B. Each scale comprises 10 masculine positive, 10 masculine negative, 10 feminine positive, 10 feminine negative, and 10 social desirability items. The new scales were administered to 282 (144 male, 138 female) high‐school students for self‐description, and the various psychometric characteristics of the scales and norms for these samples are presented. It is recommended that Australian sex‐role researchers use these new scales in preference to past scales based on American college students. As with any new scales there is a need for further normative data to be gathered and a variety of validation studies to be conducted.

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The present investigation is a reanalysis of data from AntiU and Cunningham (1979, 1980, Marsh, Antill, & Cunningham, 1987 consisting of responses to five masculinity-femimnity (MF) instruments, two self-esteem instruments, and two social desirability scales Correlations between M and F for the five instruments vaned from 23 to approximately -1 0, support for distinguishable (nonbipolar) M and F factors was found for four of the instruments Applying confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and hierarchical CFA (HCFA), the present study examined the dimensionality of MF and the influence of method/ halo effects m response to specific instruments The best fitting model identified three higher order factors, in support of traditional personality theones one factor was a bipolar MF construct, but m support of androgyny theory the other two factors were distinguishable M and F factors The factor structures were reasonably lnvanant for men and women, and methodological implications of this important finding were examined In subsequent analyses, the higher order MF factors were related to self-esteem, social desirability, and gender in order to further test interpretations of the MF factors