Gendered Sadism: Exploring Measurement Invariance between Men and Women

During the last two decades, interest in aversive personality traits increased. One such trait is everyday sadism, which is said to reflect the most aversive trait within the range of non-forensic characteristics. A plethora of studies found males to score higher on average in everyday sadism. However, valid comparisons of test scores require that measurement invariance of the test holds between the groups under scrutiny. Using two samples (ntotal = 2,909 [70% female]), we tested for gender-related measurement invariance of all currently available everyday sadism self- report measures. We found configural invariance for the Short Sadistic Impulse Scale, metric invariance for the everyday sadism subscales of the Short Dark Tetrad, Mixed Short Dark Tetrad, and the Varieties of Sadistic Tendencies, as well as scalar invariance for the Comprehensive Assessment of Sadistic Tendencies and for the Assessment of Sadistic Personality. Once controlling for common method effects due to item keying, the Short Sadistic Impulse Scale and the Comprehensive Assessment of Sadistic Tendencies exhibited lower levels of invariance. These findings have important implications for gender-specific expressions of everyday sadism that need to be considered during scale development and the interpretation of scale scores.