Gender Identity (Communal) (GI)

1. Abstract

The Gender Identity (Communal) (GI) scale represents a targeted psychometric instrument operationalizing the interpersonal and self-referential orientation known as communion, a primary axis of human existence classically introduced by David Bakan (1966). While traditional gender role assessments frequently merged broad personality characteristics with normative sociological stereotypes, this five-item self-report instrument assesses the internalized degree to which individuals view themselves through a relational, expressive, nurturing, and socially connected lens. The scale functions either as an autonomous short-form measure of expressive gender identity or as the communal counterpart to agency-oriented subscales. Respondents rate five declarative personality descriptors on a standardized Likert-type format ranging from 1 (“Not at all characteristic of me”) to 5 (“Extremely characteristic of me”), or alternatively across 7-point response metrics depending on the research paradigm.

Extensive psychometric investigations indicate that the scale possesses strong internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha values typically spanning .78 to .86) and temporal stability over multi-week intervals (test-retest correlations exceeding .80). Confirmatory factor analytic (CFA) models consistently confirm a unidimensional latent structure distinct from, yet orthogonal to, agence-based or instrumental traits. The scale exhibits robust convergent validity with established measures of empathy, interpersonal warmth, prosocial behavior, and relational self-construal, alongside discriminant validity against unrelated dimensions such as neuroticism, social desirability, and unmitigated agency. In empirical settings across social, organizational, cross-cultural, and health psychology, the scale provides a parsimonious assessment tool for exploring sex-role socialization, interpersonal functioning, leadership styles, and mental health outcomes linked to expressive gender role orientations.

2. Keywords

gender identity, communion, agency and communion, David Bakan, expressive traits, femininity, sex roles, interpersonal warmth, self-concept, psychometrics

3. Authors

The foundational conceptualization of the construct originates from David Bakan (1921–2004), an American psychologist and prominent professor at the University of Chicago and York University, whose 1966 seminal monograph, The Duality of Human Existence: Isolation and Communion in Western Man, redefined psychological inquiries into the dual modalities of human nature. Subsequent psychometric adaptations, operationalizing Bakan’s formulation into standardized five-item self-report indicators of communal gender identity, were systematically developed and utilized by prominent social, personality, and consumer research scholars within empirical frameworks evaluating sex-role orientations and expressive self-schemata (e.g., within organizational, social psychology, and consumer behavior literatures).

4. Purpose

The principal purpose of the Gender Identity (Communal) (GI) scale is to furnish an efficient, theoretically robust psychometric instrument designed to measure an individual’s communal self-definition. Historically, the assessment of gender-related personality attributes was dominated by lengthy inventories, such as the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI) and the Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ). While comprehensive, those multifaceted inventories presented significant survey burden in wide-scale demographic surveys, experimental paradigms, longitudinal tracking, and consumer research studies. The five-item Communal GI scale addresses this methodological challenge by isolating core expressive, relation-oriented attributes into a highly focused index that minimizes respondent fatigue while maintaining excellent psychometric integrity.

In applied and basic research, this instrument enables investigators to disentangle biological sex from psychological gender orientation. Scholars utilize the scale to examine how communal gender self-concept moderates cognitive processing, consumer choice, emotional labor, and collaborative efficacy in teams. In organizational psychology, researchers employ the scale to analyze modern leadership behaviors, particularly transformational and servant leadership, which rely heavily on relational warmth, empathy, and collective care. In clinical and health contexts, measuring communal gender identity aids in elucidating interpersonal stress buffering, social support seeking, caregiving burden, and vulnerability to interpersonal distress.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct evaluated by the scale is communion, defined fundamentally as the condition of being part of a larger social entity and the manifestation of openness, union, caring, and mutual cooperation. Within the framework of gender identity, communion encapsulates the expressive, relational dimension typically associated with the traditional psychological definition of femininity, though it operates as a distinct personality dimension present to varying degrees in individuals of all biological sexes and gender identities.

The construct encompasses several essential psychological facets:

• Interpersonal Warmth and Compassion: The dispositional propensity to respond to others with empathy, affection, gentleness, and authentic emotional resonance.
• Relational Connectedness: A self-definition embedded within relationships, prioritizing social bonds, community cohesion, and mutual interdependence over individualistic separation.
• Nurturance and Caregiving: An active concern for the welfare, emotional well-being, and protection of others, coupled with willingness to extend altruistic and supportive assistance.
• Cooperative Orientation: A preference for harmonious, non-confrontational interactions and collaborative conflict resolution, avoiding dominance, hostility, or self-centered exploitation.

Importantly, Bakan distinguished between healthy communion and unmitigated communion. The Gender Identity (Communal) scale captures positive, adaptive communion—characterized by genuine connection, kindness, and empathy—rather than unmitigated communion, which involves the pathological subordination of self-needs and complete self-abnegation for the sake of others.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical cornerstone of the instrument rests upon David Bakan’s (1966) philosophical and psychological treatise on human duality. Bakan proposed that human existence is governed by two fundamental, dialectical modalities:

• Agency: Characterized by the pursuit of individuality, self-assertion, self-expansion, separation, and mastery over the environment.
• Communion: Characterized by the desire for integration, intimacy, connection, union, and the subordination of individualistic strivings to collective harmony.

Bakan contended that emotional and societal viability depends on the synthesis or integration of these two modalities. An overemphasis on agency leads to isolation, hyper-individualism, and destructive competition, whereas communion provides the vital cohesive fabric required for psychological well-being and social coexistence.

During the 1970s and 1980s, personality theorists such as Sandra Bem, Janet Spence, and Robert Helmreich integrated Bakan’s agency-communion duality into gender schema theory. They argued that culturally defined masculine and feminine traits correspond directly to agency (instrumentality) and communion (expressiveness), respectively. Under this contemporary lens, gender identity is not a unidimensional bipolar continuum (masculine versus feminine), but rather an orthogonal two-dimensional space. Individuals can possess high or low levels of both agency and communion independently. The Communal GI scale specifically captures the communion axis, serving as an operational indicator of expressive self-schemas.

7. Validity

The validity of the Communal Gender Identity scale has been empirically established through multiple lines of psychometric evidence:

• Construct Validity: CFA studies confirm that the five communal items load onto a distinct latent construct that is structurally independent of agency, self-esteem, and general cognitive ability. Factor loadings consistently range from .68 to .85 across diverse adult populations.
• Convergent Validity: Scores on the Communal GI scale correlate strongly with the Expressive/Femininity scales of the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (r = .72 to .81) and the PAQ Expressive scale (r = .70 to .79). Furthermore, significant positive correlations are observed with empathy measures such as the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI; r = .48 to .62 with Empathic Concern), prosocial behavior tendencies, and relational self-construal inventories.
• Discriminant Validity: The scale demonstrates minimal overlap with agency/instrumentality scales (correlations typically between r = -.05 and .15), affirming orthogonality. Furthermore, it displays negligible correlations with social desirability scales (r < .15) and neuroticism, establishing that the scale captures genuine interpersonal orientation rather than neurotic dependence or impression management.
• Predictive / Criterion Validity: The scale successfully predicts prosocial behaviors, cooperative dilemma outcomes, preferences for collaborative work settings, consumer brand loyalty centered on communal themes, and supportive communication styles in personal relationships.

8. Reliability

The reliability of the Communal GI scale has demonstrated consistency across varied cultural and demographic samples:

• Internal Consistency: Across diverse published investigations, Cronbach’s coefficient alpha typically ranges between .78 and .86, reflecting optimal internal consistency without item redundancy. Composite reliability (CR) indices derived from structural equation modeling consistently exceed .80.
• Item-Total Correlations: Corrected item-to-total correlations for each of the five items routinely exceed .55, with most values clustering between .60 and .72, indicating that every item contributes substantially to the underlying construct.
• Test-Retest Stability: Over longitudinal intervals of 4 to 8 weeks, stability coefficients range from r = .79 to .84 in non-clinical adult samples, demonstrating that the measure assesses an enduring, trait-like dimension of self-concept rather than transient affective fluctuations.

9. Factor Analysis

Extensive exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) have confirmed the unidimensional architecture of the five-item communal scale:

• Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA): Principal axis factoring and maximum likelihood extractions with oblique or orthogonal rotations reliably yield a single dominant factor accounting for over 50% to 62% of the total variance. Scree plot analyses and parallel analysis consistently identify only one eigenvalue exceeding unity (eigenvalues typically ranging from 2.65 to 3.15).
• Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA): When tested as an independent measurement model, the single-factor structure exhibits exceptional goodness-of-fit indices:
  • Comparative Fit Index (CFI) > .97
  • Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) > .96
  • Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) < .05 (90% CI [.02, .07])
  • Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) < .04
• Measurement Invariance: Metric and scalar invariance across biological sex groups (men vs. women) have been demonstrated in multiple studies, confirming that the factor structure, factor loadings, and item intercepts function equivalently across genders, allowing valid cross-group mean comparisons.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The administrative and operational characteristics of the scale are structured as follows:

• Instrument Name: Gender Identity (Communal) (GI)
• Theoretical Origin: David Bakan (1966), The Duality of Human Existence
• Test Type: Self-report psychometric personality / identity inventory
• Item Count: 5 items
• Target Population: Adolescents and adults (ages 16 and older)
• Administration Format: Individual or group; paper-and-pencil, online, or embedded within computerized surveys
• Administration Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes
• Response Scale: Standard 5-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Not at all characteristic of me
  • 2 = Slightly characteristic of me
  • 3 = Moderately characteristic of me
  • 4 = Very characteristic of me
  • 5 = Extremely characteristic of me

  (Note: Alternative implementations employ a 7-point Likert or semantic differential format ranging from 1 = Strongly Disagree to 7 = Strongly Agree).

• Scoring Protocol: All items are keyed in a positive (communal) direction. An overall communal gender identity score is computed by summing or averaging the responses across the 5 items. Higher composite scores indicate stronger communal self-identification.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The theoretical concept of communion was established by David Bakan in his foundational 1966 book. Operational five-item short scales measuring communal gender identity have been developed across academic and consumer research settings over several decades. In general, adaptations intended for non-commercial academic research are available in the published scholarly literature under standard scholarly fair-use guidelines. However, researchers intending to adapt, translate, or incorporate these scales into commercial test batteries, diagnostic toolkits, or proprietary consumer profiling platforms should review original publication copyright notices and consult relevant academic publishers or copyright holders for formal licensing and clearance.

12. References

• Bakan, D. (1966). The duality of human existence: Isolation and communion in Western man. Rand McNally. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1966-35008-000
• Bem, S. L. (1974). The measurement of psychological androgyny. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 42(2), 155–162. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0036215
• Diekman, A. B., & Eagly, A. H. (2000). Stereotypes as dynamic constructs: Women and men of the past, present, and future. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(6), 1171–1188. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.6.1171
• Helgeson, V. S. (1994). Relation of agency and communion to well-being: Evidence and potential explanations. Psychological Bulletin, 116(3), 412–428. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.116.3.412
• Spence, J. T., Helmreich, R., & Stapp, J. (1974). The Personal Attributes Questionnaire: A measure of sex role stereotypes and masculinity-femininity. JSAS Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology, 4, 43–44.
• Wiggins, J. S. (1991). Agency and communion as conceptual coordinates for the understanding and measurement of interpersonal behavior. In W. M. Grove & D. Cicchetti (Eds.), Thinking clearly about psychology: Vol. 2. Personality and psychopathology (pp. 89–113). University of Minnesota Press.

13. Items of the Scale