What Makes Women Social Cynics? An Exploratory Study

Abstract

Although women are comprised almost half of the human population, still their experiences as a minority within the larger social framework, affect the affective and behavioral aspects of their personality including social cynicism. Unfortunately, social cynicism had never been empirically studied from the perspective of women, especially indigenously. By applying a qualitative approach, this study explored an indigenous understanding of social cynicism in a sample of (N=20) young adult women through a focus group discussion (n=6) and open-ended questionnaires (n=14), respectively. Five central themes emerged after the thematic analysis of the transcribed data that included gender inequality and exploitation, misrepresentation and misinformation, negative beliefs and generalizations, authority and control, and lastly, safety and security concerns. The findings showed several distinctive and indigenous themes like paternal authoritarianism, religion-based misinterpretation and sense of imminent danger while a few sub-themes were consistent with the previous literature. By exploring the construct of social cynicism in women, this study had not only broadened the limits of existing research literature on this construct but its themes could be applied for indigenous theory and scale development.

Development and Validation of Social Cynicism Scale for Women

“…Initially, similar themes were clustered together and further inspected for repetitive themes. The reduced data was then analyzed to generate codes, leading to the extraction of central themes with relevant sub-themes, which served as the basis for item generation (Younas et al, 2021). It resulted in a pool of 36 items, which were presented for content validation and further scrutiny to a panel of five expert judges, including four SMEs (subject matter experts, all Assistant Professors of Psychology) and one English language expert (an M.Phil.…”