RANKING HARASSMENT - A MULTIDIMENSIONAL-SCALING OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT SCENARIOS

Despite a recent storm of research on sexual harassment, there is not a useful way to categorize sexual harassment behaviors. Researchers ha ve often relied on the dimension of severity, arranging behaviors in t erms of how severe or offensive each behavior is. However, because sex ual harassment, by definition, necessarily involves an act that is off ensive and severe, we challenge the dimension of severity as the most meaningful categorization. In this exploratory research, we employed m ultidimensional scaling to analyze the results of a sorting task. Unde rgraduate women in the United States were asked to sort 18 sexual hara ssment scenarios. Results suggest a two-dimensional solution, with pub licness and traditionality as the proposed dimensions.