Empowerment is a primary outcome of many health interventions with women. Typical outcome measures, however focus exclusively on specific symptoms, neglecting the clinically important attitudes and behaviors associated with increased empowerment and well-being. Empowerment is conceptualized as enabling women to access skills and resources to cope more effectively with current as well as future stress and trauma. This study investigated a new measure of personal empowerment in women, the Personal Progress Scale-Revised (PPS-R). Results suggest that the PPS-R is a promising measure of empowerment in women, demonstrating excellent reliability and validity in diverse sample of women. Additionally, the PPS-R demonstrated preliminary utility with a subgroup of abused women, a vulnerable group of women for whom empowerment is a variable of high importance.
New measures of sex role orientation that do not assume a unidimensional continuum model of masculinity and femininity are reviewed, particularly with respect to androgyny. Studies intended to validate the constructs are also reviewed. Although based on similar conceptualizations of sex role characteristics, the scales differ psychometrically, and measurement questions are discussed. Negatively valued sex-correlated characteristics, differences in the relative social utility of masculine-and feminine-typed behaviors, differential performance of sex role categories in more complex social situations, and parental practices related to the new formulations appear to be important areas for future sex role research.Sex roles and sex typing have experienced an enthusiastic, if occasionally impassioned, rebirth of interest in the last several years. In response to new formulations of sex role style (
This study focuses on resilience in poor women and asks the question: In the face of a lifetime of adversity, stress, and poverty, what are the factors that enable some poor women to lead positive and productive lives? Fifty lowincome, urban, African American women were interviewed, and factors that contribute to their resilience were explored. Specifically, we examined the influence of supportive and problematic social ties, downward social comparison, and self-efficacy on resilience, as measured by scales designed to assess well-being. In addition, the participants' perceptions of factors that contribute to their resilience were elicited. The women in the sample were between the ages of 19 and 54, were employed at least 20 hours per week, and had at least one child below the age of 13 at home. Multiple regression analyses revealed that problematic social ties and downward social comparison together predicted over 48% of the variance in resilience.The link between poverty and mental health is well-established in the psychological literature (Belle, 1990;Bruce,
We look at some of the ways in which feminist theorists and researchers apply new insights to established topics in psychology, as they explore the landscape of the unknown and unspoken in the lives of girls and women. The articles in this special issue present research and reflections by a group of feminist scholars, some of us from the editorial board of the Psychology of Women Quarterly and others from the larger academic community. Each contributor, selecting from a personal interest or expertise, reconceptualizes a topical area of psychology with the intent of reframing our understanding of its meaning, its impact on women's functioning, and/or its application to feminist research and theory. To provide a background, we review a sample of contributions of feminist thought to the contemporary revolution in science. We then ask the question: In what ways have feminist perspectives and scholarship transformed psychology in the particular areas addressed by these authors?
The science and practice of psychological health care for women in the new millennium provide us with a rich arena for innovation and application of feminist interventions. In the Decade of Behavior, feminist interventions are well positioned to address the goals of women's safety, lifespan health, competence, personal strength, resilience in response to stress and adversity, and maintenance of positive life styles. For the past 30 years, feminist and womancentered psychologists have been at the forefront of research and intervention with the issues that impact the lives of contemporary women (Worell & Johnson, 1997). The movement toward developing new approaches to address the sources and solutions to women's distress was energized by mounting dissatisfaction with traditional models of women's mental health and the absence of women from the corpus of psychological research and scholarship (Chesler, 1972;Weisstein, 1968). SOURCES OF DISSATISFACTIONAt the base of this dissatisfaction were theories and practices that framed the standards for normal human behavior according to the lives and experiences of mainstream male culture and of middle-class, heterosexual, White women in the United States (Greene, 1986;Rawlings & Carter, 1977). From these perspectives, the socialized behaviors of women, especially those from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds, were frequently viewed as deviant, deficient, and changeworthy. Subsequent feminist scholarship and research revealed the inadequacies of these models of women's mental health, suggesting that the construction of women's distress as illness served to maintain the prevailing gender and cultural asymmetries in social power.Some of the more egregious practices uncovered by feminist scholars were those that (a) evaluated personality traits traditionally attributed to women (e.g., nurturance, friendliness, concern for others) as less typical of the healthy person than those attributed to men (e.g., dominance, independence, competence; Broverman, Broverman, Clarkson, Rosenkrantz, & Vogel, 1970); (b) attributed more negative stereotypes to poor women or women of color than to middle-class, White women (Greene, 1986;Landrine, 1989); (c) reflected evidence of gender, racial, and sexuality biases in diagnosis and psychotherapy with women, viewing normative gender-role behaviors (e.g., dependency) as illness and role-resistant behavior (e.g., achievement striving) as pathology (American Psychological Association, 1975;Franks, 1986;Kaplan, 1983); and (d) attributed women's legitimate reports of distress to biology or intrapsychic disorder Feminist interventions to facilitate women's psychological well-being are forging new pathways to achieving the goals of the Decade of Behavior. In emphasizing the complex interplay between internal and external factors in women's lives, feminist interventions are designed to promote women's safety, health, positive life styles, personal strength, competence, and resilience. In contrast, prevailing medical models locate the problem within the...
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