Factors Affecting Sexual Harassment Perception And Attitude:Big Five Personality And Sexual Harassment Script

Sexual harassment is a worldwide problem that threatens the individual physical andmental health of many women and men. Although scholars have done much to study it,there is no generally accepted definition of sexual harassment. Most definitions of theproblem are from a legislative perspective, and ignore the individual’s psychologicalresponse to it. Psychology scholars argue that the definition of sexual harassment shoulddistinguish between legal and psychological perspectives. The Legal definition focus on thelegal case and the surface features of the victims, while the psychological definition shouldfocus on victims’ psychological response to the situation. Sexual harassment reflects theindividual’s subjective cognition of the situation.This Research used the perspective of psychology to study sexual harassment, to try toexplore how individual factors, such as gender, scripts and personality traits, affects bothindividual’s attitude and perception of sexual harassment.Three questionnaires,(1)The sexual harassment definitions questionnaire,(2)The sexualharassment attitude scale,(3)NEO—FFI(Chinese version), were administered to a sample of107(50males,59females) individuals randomly selected across the country. SPSS12.0analysis was used to analyze the data. Results are as follows:(1)There was no significant interactive effect on individuals’ perception of sexualharassment between gender and sexual harassment script. Namely, individual’s gender andperson’s gender in the sexual harassment script does not affect the individual’s perceptionof sexual harassment.(2)Sexual harassment script has significant effect on individual’s perception of sexualharassment. Individuals perceive more situations as being sexual in different-sex sexualharassment situation.(3)Gender has significant effect in same-sex sexual harassment situation. Men perceivemore situations as being sexual than women in same-sex sexual harassment situation thanwomen.(4)Gender has a significant effect on individual’s attitude about sexual harassment.That is, males have more tolerance than women of sexual harassment.(5) Neuroticism is negatively related to individual’s attitude about sexual harassment. However correlations revealed no significant relationship between the other fourpersonality traits and individual’s attitude about sexual harassment.Finally, I try to give further analysis and discussion of these results, based onadditional considerations and reflections of the study.