The Undergraduate's Perceptions Of Ambiguous Sexual Harassment: Impact Of Gender And Attractiveness

Sexual harassment has been acknowledged to be a widespread and serious problem in today's society. Although researches in the foreign are relatively maturity, a universally accepted definition of harassment does not yet exist. The definition of harassment in our country is mostly legal definition, a lot of factors that influence people's perception of sexual harassment are ignored.Fitzgerald, Swan, and Magley (1997) argue that a distinction needs to be made between legal definitions of sexual harassment and psychological definitions. Legal definitions are narrower, depend on criteria that are external to the victim, psychological definitions, in contrast, focus on the victim's experience, viewing sexual harassment as a question of individual perception.My research will focus on psychological definition, i.e. focus on some factors that influence the perception of sexual harassment, investigate how men and women perceived male perpetrator/ female victim matched and unmatched in their level of physical attractiveness engaged in an ambiguous sexual harassment encounter.With 2×2×2 factorial experimental design, We tested 484 college students in Wuhan by the tool of the representation of an ambiguous sexual harassment scenario that attached two inch black and white portrait-style photos of professor (the perpetrator) and the student(the victim). The data were analyzed with SPSS 11.5 statistical software.There were several conclusions:1. 14.4% of subjects reported experiencing sexual harassment and they perceived the scenario as more sexually harassing than the subjects that reported not experiencing sexual harassment.2. The main effects of participant's gender are significant. Women have strongerperception of harassment than men.Finally, some possible reasons that lead the effects of physical attractiveness not significant are discussed. It might have to do with the present of photos, the link of photo and scenario, direction and the degree of ambiguousness of scenario. Some topics for future research were indicated and suggestions to this study were also provided.