Development of the Attitudes Toward the Atypically Gendered Inventory (ATAG-I)

Purpose: The foundation undergirding this work posits the discrete categories of male and female fail to adequately describe that part of human experience referred to as sex and gender, evidenced by the existence of two naturally occurring challenges to this binary: the transgendered and the intersexed, herein referred to as, the atypically gendered. The goal of this work was to develop a valid assessment of societal attitudes toward the atypically gendered.

Methods: Construction of the ATAG-I involved five steps. First, a list of potential items was composed via the domain-sampling method of instrument development and was based on a content analysis of the relevant literature. Second, the prototype instrument was examined by three atypically gendered persons who conducted a retranslation task that provided a preliminary estimate of evidence of content validity. Third, a second retranslation task was conducted with a group of 22 naïve adults, all students in a graduate-level social work class to determine if the definitions of intersexuality and transgenderism were clear and understandable, and to assess the extent that participants could identify the items that belonged to each of the two scales. Fourth, the revised prototype instrument was given to a group of 45 participants recruited from a major Midwestern university, and then re-administered to the same group after approximately five weeks to test for temporal stability. Finally, data were collected on a sample of 271 participants recruited from undergraduate and graduate classes in social work, sociology, and education to assess reliability, and content, factorial, and construct validity. Additional information was gathered from this sample that was used to assess evidence of convergent and discriminant construct validity.

Results: The ATAG-I consists of two scales: the Attitude Toward the Intersexed Scale (ATI-S), and the Attitude Toward the Transgendered Scale (ATT-S). Psychometric analyses included Cronbach's alpha, factor analyses, correlation, and item analyses. Cronbach's coefficient alpha was .933 for the ATI-S and .969 for the ATT-S. An item analysis on both scales showed that all items contributed more or less equally to the overall mean, that no item was diminishing internal reliability, and provided evidence that all items on a scale were measuring the same construct. A principal components analysis resulted in a two-component solution that explained 51% of the variance in the items. Items loaded as expected resulting in one component defined by the intersexed items and the other defined by the transgendered items. Standard error of measurement was 6.15 for the ATI-S and 7.46 for the ATT-S, resulting in an acceptable confidence interval of the true scores. The test-retest analysis resulted in a substantial correlation between the two sets of scores, r(14) = .845, p < .001, two-tailed.

The result was an instrument that yielded highly reliable scores. These analyses indicated excellent levels of reliability and provided evidence of content, factorial, and construct validity. Implications: The ATAG-I is a psychometrically sound instrument that can pave the way for future research concerning societal attitudes toward the atypically gendered.