Multifactor Adult Gender Identity Scale (MAGIS)
Deanna Jackson and David Perry
Florida Atlantic University
Gender identity has been referred to and studied by psychologists for decades, yet there is currently no consensus on how to operationalize and measure a person's gender identity. Several researchers over the years have tackled gender identity from very different and usually disparate theoretical viewpoints. Measures with one to three items which have not been subjected to psychometric analysis are commonly used as measures of gender identity. When measures are psychometrically analyzed, the conceptualization of the measurement of gender identity varies.
Gender identity has previously been measured by self-reports of how similar a person perceives themselves to be with cultural gender stereotypes, how masculine or feminine a person believes themselves to be, by preferences for gender-typed occupations, hobbies and activities, and has been inferred from self-ratings of communal and agentic traits and other gender-typed personality attributes. However, a great deal of these previous measurements are conceptually flawed since they infer gender from how well a person fits the cultural conceptualizations and stereotypes of gender roles and the different sexes.
Egan and Perry (2001) factor analyzed a variety of questions about the relation of a child and their gender, resulting in several factors that could all be described as gender identity.  They proposed a multidimensional model of gender identity and found evidence that different aspects of gender identity differentially predicted psychosocial outcomes in children. This scale is an extension of this multidimensional approach to adults. Although Egan and Perry's study only found 3 factors, our study finds five factors in adults.  The original 3 are duplicated, however two of those have spit into different facets, namely typicality was split into same-gender and other-gender typicality, and gender contentedness was split into gender contentedness and gender boundary intolerance.

 

The Factors

  • Same Gender Typicality: This subscale reflects the degree that the person feels they are a typical example of what  same-gender people are.
  • Other Gender Typicality: this subscale reflects the degree that the person feels they are a typical example of what other-gender people are.
  • Gender Contentedness: This shows how content they are with their sex assignment, or if they do not want the sex they were assigned.
  • Gender Boundary Intolerance: this scale reflects the degree that a person feels confined or restricted by their gender.
  • Felt Pressure for Gender Conformity:  This subscale measures how socially pressured a person feels to have same-gendered objects and behaviors and to avoid cross-gendered objects and behaviors.

 

The MAGIS questionnaire - female version, male version

MAGIS scoring sheet.