Women, Men, and the Construction of Individual Modernity Scales in China

The authors' research explores the applicability of Inkeles and Smith's individual modernity paradigm to women and men in the People's Republic of China. The authors' analysis of questionnaire data demonstrates that, for the Chinese male respondents, individ ual modernity scales can be constructed that are highly reliable and that are essentially the same in structure and content as the overall modernity scales created for the (exclusively male) respondents in the six nonsocialist developing countries included in the original study. Also, despite some minor variations, there is a very high degree of similarity in the structure, content, and reliability of scales constructed independently for the male and female respondents. Finally, on the basis of these results, the authors construct gender- neutral individual modernity scales based on the entire sample.