Masculine gender role stress. Scale development and component factors in the appraisal of stressful situations.
The MGRS scale is a quick way to measure when men see events as threats to their male identity.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team built a new 40-item questionnaire called the Masculine Gender Role Stress (MGRS) scale. They asked 243 college men and women how stressful they would find situations like "being outperformed by a woman at work."
Five sub-scores were made: fear of being feminine, fear of showing weakness, fear of intellectual failure, fear of being dominated, and fear of sexual rejection.
What they found
Men scored much higher than women on every sub-scale. Higher MGRS scores also linked up with more anger and more anxiety, showing the tool can spot men who appraise events as threatening to their male identity.
Internal consistency was strong (alphas 0.80-0.90), so the items hang together well.
How this fits with other research
Like Iwata et al. (1990) with their Self-Injury Trauma Scale, Rutter et al. (1987) followed the same recipe: write items, give them to a sample, and report reliability. Both papers are pure scale-building work, not treatment studies.
Oliver et al. (2002) and English et al. (1995) also checked internal consistency and inter-rater numbers, but they did it for Dutch and Swedish versions of the Reiss Screen for adults with ID. The MGRS adds a new domain—gender-role stress in typical adults—so it extends the family of brief behavior-analytic screeners.
Carretti et al. (2013) later showed the Vienna Frailty Questionnaire can get good retest numbers in ID services. Rutter et al. (1987) did not test retest, so the VFQ-ID-R now supersedes the MGRS on that psychometric step.
Why it matters
If you work with adult male clients who shut down, explode, or avoid tasks when they feel "less manly," the MGRS gives you a five-minute snapshot of their stress triggers. You can then weave those triggers into your functional assessment and teach replacement behaviors that feel safe for the client’s identity.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
It is proposed that masculine gender role socialization affects whether men appraise specific situations as stressful. Behavioral research on stress and coping has remained relatively blind to the possibility of significant gender role differences in appraising events as stressful. Therefore, a new scale was developed to measure masculine gender role stress (MGRS). Data were presented to substantiate hypotheses that MGRS scores (1) significantly distinguish men from women, (2) are unrelated to global measures of sex-typed masculinity, and (3) are significantly associated with at least two measures of self-reported stress (i.e., anger and anxiety). Stressful situations represented on the MGRS scale include cognitive, behavioral, and environmental events associated with the male gender role. Factor analysis demonstrates that these concerns cluster in five particular domains reflecting physical inadequacy, emotional inexpressiveness, subordination to women, intellectual inferiority, and performance failures involving work and sex. The findings are discussed in terms of cognitive-behavioral concepts of stress and coping.
Behavior modification, 1987 · doi:10.1177/01454455870112001