Ranking Harassment: A Multidimensional Scaling of Sexual Harassment Scenarios

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Despite a recent storm of research on sexual harassment, there is not a useful way to categorize sexual harassment behaviors. Researchers have often relied on the dimension of severity, arranging behaviors in terms of how severe or offensive each behavior is. However, because sexual harassment, by definition, necessarily involves an act that is offensive and severe, we challenge the dimension of severity as the most meaningful categorization. In this exploratory research, we employed multidimensional scaling to analyze the results of a sorting task. Undergraduate women in the United States were asked to sort 18 sexual harassment scenarios. Results suggest a two-dimensional solution, with publicness and traditionality as the proposed dimensions.