Labeling sexual harassment in the military: An extension and replication

Research conducted by V. Magley, C. Hulin, L. F. Fitzgerald, and M. DeNardo (1999) has suggested that women who experience sexual harassment report wo rse outcomes independent of the labeling process. This study replicates and extends that work. Discriminant analyses were conducted on a sample of app roximately 28,000 men and women from the military. The authors included var iables similar to those used by V. Magley et al., as well as a variety of a ntecedent variables. Two significant functions were obtained from the discr iminant analysis. The Ist function ordered groups according to the frequenc y of harassment and accounted for substantially more variance than did the 2nd function, which ordered groups according to whether they labeled their experiences as sexual harassment. The overall results from these analyses d emonstrate that labeling incidents as sexual harassment is of marginal mean ingfulness in terms of job outcomes and antecedents of harassment.