A COMPARISON OF 2 COHORTS OF COLLEGE-STUDENTS IN RESPONSES TO THE MALE-FEMALE RELATION QUESTIONNAIRE

Two cohorts of male and female introductory psychology students from t he same university, tested in 1978 and 1992, were given the male or th e female form of the Male-Female Relations Questionnaire (MFRQ; Spence , Helmreich, & Sawin, 1980), which assesses respondents' personal gend er-role preferences and behaviors in interpersonal situations. In both genders, the means of the majority of MFRQ items decreased significan tly from 1978 to 1992, but item means were still fairly close to the m idpoint of the response scale. Women tended to be less willing than me n to assign leadership roles to men but in social interactions with th e other gender, they admitted to deliberately acting ''feminine'' as m uch or more than men admitted to acting ''masculine.'' Correlations be tween the MFRQ and the Attitudes Toward Women Scale (AWS; Spence & Hel mreich, 1978) were also determined and found to be substantial. Psycho metric differences between the instruments suggested, however, that th e MFRQ provides unique information and may often be more useful than t he AWS in detecting relationships with other variables.