The Sources of Gender Role Attitudes among Christian and Muslim ...

212 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION
Arab surnames are common among other ethnic groups (e.g. Abraham and
Moses ate common among Jewish Americans) and among non-Arab Muslims
(e.g. Pakistanis), I used a filter question on Arab ancestry to exchde non-Amb
respondents (phone conversation with Zogby, 1999). The question identifies the
birthplace of the respondent, the respondent's mother and father, and the
respondent's maternal and paternal grandparents.
The survey questionnaire was administered to a systematic, random sample
of women drawn from these two frames. The final sample size was 501; a
response rate of 47.2 percent. The median age of women sampled is 45 and their
geographic distribution is similar to that found in the 1990 census -- 32.4
percent ate clustered in the east/northeast (mainly in the New York and
Washington, DC areas), 35.3 percent ate located in the midwest (mainly in
Detroit and Chicago), 25.6 percent live in the west (mainly in Los Angeles),
anda minority (6.7 percent) live in the south.
Though the sample is more geographically diverse than previous studies on
Arab-American women, the ability to generalize findings remains limited, which
is a common and often unavoidable problem in research on unidentified popula-
tions, such as Arab Americans. Since the sampling frame is based on sumames,
the most assimilated women ate likely underrepresented, those who have out-
married or whose names have been Anglocized over time. The sample is likelu
older and more highly educated than Arab Americans asa group, given the
sampling frame characteristics (i.e., voluntary membership and registered
voters). Since education is known to have a liberating impact on women's
gender ideologies, the sample wŸ likely be skewed in that direction. However, it
should be equally so for Muslims and for Christians. In sum, this research
represents one of the first national studies of Arab-American women and has the
unique ability to examine intra-ethnic, inter-religious differences in women's
gender tole attitudes.
Measures
The dependent variable for this study is degree of gender traditionalism.
Gender traditionalism is measured with a five-item index that gauges women's
attitudes on marital roles, parenting, and non-traditional public roles. Each of
the five items has Likert~scale response categories ranging from (1) Strongly
disagree to (5) Strongly agree. The resulting index ranges from 5 to 25, with
higher scores representing greater support for traditional gender roles (alpha =
.67). Appendix A provides additional information on variable measures.
To identify cultural differences among Arab-American women, the indepen-
dent variables include several dimensions of religion and ethnicity. Religious
affiliation is operationalized with a dummy variable for Muslim affiliation, and
religiosity is operationalized with three variables measuring degree of religious
involvement and strength of beliefs. The first item measures the respondent's
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