New Categories Are Not Enough
New Categories Are Not Enough
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DOI：
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发表时间：
2015
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影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Aliya Saperstein
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作者：
Laurel Westbrook;Aliya Saperstein
最近，学者和活动家们把注意力转向改善调查研究中的性和性别测量。这项工作的重点是在回答关于答卷人性别的问题时，除了“男性”和“女性”之外，还包括其他选项。这是朝着反映性别生活的多样性和更好地使调查测量实践与当代性别理论保持一致迈出的重要一步。然而，我们对美国四项规模最大、持续时间最长的调查中的问卷、手册和其他技术材料进行了系统研究，结果表明，在社会调查中，性别的概念化和衡量还存在一些其他问题，这些问题也值得关注，包括将性和性别视为同义词的本质主义做法，这些做法很容易被他人确定，很明显，并且在生命历程中保持不变。我们发现，这些理解远远超出了关于受访者性别的直接问题，渗透到调查中。由“男性”和“女性”、“兄弟”和“姐妹篇”以及“丈夫”和“妻子”组成的超性别世界塑造了我们在调查数据中看到的内容。如果不加以改变，调查将继续重复统计表述，抹去重要的差异层面，并可能限制对社会不平等长期存在的过程的理解。
Recently, scholars and activists have turned their attention toward improving the measurement of sex and gender in survey research. The focus of this effort has been on including answer options beyond “male” and “female” to questions about the respondent’s gender. This is an important step toward both reflecting the diversity of gendered lives and better aligning survey measurement practice with contemporary gender theory. However, our systematic examination of questionnaires, manuals, and other technical materials from four of the largest and longest-running surveys in the United States indicates that there are a number of other issues with how gender is conceptualized and measured in social surveys that also deserve attention, including essentialist practices that treat sex and gender as synonymous, easily determined by others, obvious, and unchanging over the life course. We find that these understandings extend well beyond direct questions about the respondent’s gender, permeating the surveys. A hyper-gendered world of “males” and “females,” “brothers” and “sisters,” and “husbands” and “wives” shapes what we can see in survey data. If not altered, surveys will continue to reproduce statistical representations that erase important dimensions of variation and likely limit understanding of the processes that perpetuate social inequality.