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The Impact of Sexual Victimization on Personality: A Longitudinal Study of Gendered Attributes

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Abstract

Little is known about how sexual victimization may affect a woman’s self-reported personality ratings. In the present study endorsement ratings of gendered attributes, as measured by the Extended Personal Attributes Questionnaire, were examined over a 3-year span using multiple group latent growth modeling. Differences in the endorsement of gendered attributes between college female non-victims (N = 158) and victims (N = 158) of sexual aggression were tested. Whereas endorsement of communal and positive agentic attributes were stable across time, victims remained consistently less traditionally feminine (i.e., positively communal and nurturing) than non-victims. Victims also appeared to become relatively more self-focused (i.e., negative masculinity) across time than non-victims. This pattern suggests that sexual victimization may have lasting effects on victims’ ability to focus on the nurturing, trusting aspects of relationships; rather they have a preoccupation with their own needs and goals that appears to strengthen with time. Such a pattern sheds insight into how self-processes may contribute to the relationship difficulties often observed in sexual assault victims. Implications of these results for both personality and sexual aggression researchers are discussed.

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Notes

  1. It would be very interesting to examine the effect of sexual victimization on the endorsement of gendered attributes for those women who were first victimized in college (i.e. during the time frame of this study). However, only 24 women were victimized for the first time during their first year of college, and only 18 were first victimized during their second year of college. Although the authors understand the importance of these groups, we are not confident that longitudinal analyses on such a small sample would be reliable.

  2. Individuals familiar with confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) may notice the resemblance between the model represented in Fig. 1 and a standard CFA model. In fact, the LGM described above is a special parameterization of the standard CFA model (Meredith & Tisak 1990). Given that LGMs, like CFAs, can be tested within the SEM framework, all extensions of general SEM can be made to LGM. This includes multiple group analysis.

  3. It is important to note that the omnibus test of Model 4 may fail even though the model passes all previous individual tests. This is due to the restrictive nature of the omnibus test compared to the series of individual tests. Any discrepancies found between Model 4 and previous models are discussed.

  4. A 2 (victimization) × 3 (time) ANOVA was also performed on the data. The results obtained with the LGM analysis were supported with the results of the ANOVAs. In addition, results of the ANOVAs showed that assumptions of the ANOVA were violated (equal variances), which supports our decision not to utilize this analysis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Psychology Department, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 296 Eberhart Building, Greensboro, NC, 27402, USA

    Darcy McMullin & Jacquelyn W. White

  2. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    R. J. Wirth

Authors
  1. Darcy McMullin
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  2. R. J. Wirth
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  3. Jacquelyn W. White
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Correspondence to Jacquelyn W. White.

Additional information

This work was supported by grants no. MH5083 from the National Institute of Mental Health and no. 98-WT-VX-0010 from the National Institute of Justice awarded to the third author.

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McMullin, D., Wirth, R.J. & White, J.W. The Impact of Sexual Victimization on Personality: A Longitudinal Study of Gendered Attributes. Sex Roles 56, 403–414 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-006-9179-8

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