2.4. Procedure

The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI) [13] was administered to the participants in its Spanish version, which was adapted and validated by Expósito et al. [13]. This instrument has 22 items on ambivalent sexism (α Cronbach = 0.90), which is made up of two scales: The first scale contains 11 items referring to hostile sexism (α Cronbach = 0.89) (i.e., “Young men should exert control over who their girlfriends interact with”), and the second scale contains the remaining 11 items related to benevolent sexism (α Cronbach = 0.86) (i.e., “A boy will feel incomplete if he is not dating a girl”). The item response format is based on a Likert-type scale with response options ranging from 0 (“strongly disagree”) to 5 (“strongly agree”), where higher scores represent higher levels of sexism. See Appendix A and Appendix B.

Sociodemographic variables such as age, gender, ethnicity, country, and religious affiliation were measured. The variable “age” was centered using the mean since the value of 0 was not included in the study sample. In relation to the “religious identity”, this variable initially was composed by the following categories: “Hindu”, “Evangelical or Protestant”, “Catholic”, “None and I don’t believe in God”, “None, but I believe in God”, and “Other”. Due to the low frequency in most of its categories, firstly this variable was recodified in four categories to describe the sample: “Catholic”, “None and I don’t believe in God”, “None, but I believe in God”, and “Other (Hindu, Evangelical or Protestant, etc.)”. Finally, this variable was dichotomized to carry out the regression analyses giving the value of 1 to the category “Catholic” and the value of 0 to “others”, which resulted from merging all the remaining categories. Similarly, the variable “marital status” was recoded to dichotomous (1 = single; 0 = other) given the low frequency of the other response categories such as “widower”, “separated or divorced”, and “common law or common-law partnership”. All of them were unified in the category “other”.