Verbal Aggression: A Critical Reply to Reported Gender Differences

Sallinen-Kuparinen, Thompson, and Klopf (1991) conclude that Finnish and American university students showed no significant differences on a measure of verbal aggressiveness and that men of both cultures were more verbally aggressive. Errors in data analyses, presentation, and interpretation make such conclusions questionable. A methodological concern is the minimally acceptable reliability estimate of the verbal aggression measure. Given the cultural and gender subgroups, separate alpha coefficients should have been re orted for Finnish men and women and American men and women. If there were subgroup difkrences, more information would be a d a b l e on the appropriateness of using this scale with these disparate groups. It is also apparent from the presentation of the data that the authon made three errors in analysis in the original study. First, the report of the 2 x 2 factorial analysis of variance with a significant F with 3,373 df is meaninfess., That reported F can only be for the combined between terms ( iven the 3 df ). Since t ere 1s a s ~ g d i c a n t main effect and a significant interaction, the corntined F is obviously significant, but not meaningful. An examination of the cell means (Finnish men = 43.34; Finnish women = 42.28; American men = 44.59; American women = 39.64) indicates that the interaction of culture by gender is the only significant term that is interpretable. Clearly, American women are significantly less verbally aggressive than the other three grou s This is an ordinal interaction based on the single cell (American women) having significant& lower reported means. All other differences are trivial and any inter retation of the main effect of gender is inappropriate. Second, the least-squares solution offereiis roblematic since homogeneity of variance assumptions were violated (F,, = 2.40, < 05) w h e such a least-squares solution does allow unequal cell sizes, it does not correcr fbr heterogeneous variances. Third, the authon wrongly resent a series of post hoc analyses using inappropriate t tests. Student's t should not be use l for unplanned comparisons and in no case can nonorthogonal groups be used in such tests. However, in the last sentence in the first aragraph on 682, the authors present the results of such a nonortho onal test of mean dJerences. ~ a c f X : authors selected any a posteriori test that did not take a8vantage of chance and protected experiment-wise alpha levels, they would have come to the more appropriate conclusion that American women were significantly lower than the other three groups on verbal aggression and no other differences were si nificant. This is again support for an ordinal interaction based on a single cell mean being d f e r e n t and negates the conclusion of a stereotypic main-effect gender difference in this data set. If any interpretation is to be made of this troubled data set, it would be most appropriate to conclude that the lower scores on verbal aggression for American women may be a culturespecific language behavior of English-speaking North American females. Measures on self-reported use of verbal aggression simply do not speak to gender-appropriate language behavior as suggested by the authon in the last sentence on page 682.