Thesis Title: Gender Role Beliefs, Self-Silencing and Psychological Distress in Married Women
Student Name: Ghania Ahmad
Supervisor: Maria Ghazal
Degree: BS
Year: 2014-2018
Abstract
The present study investigated the relationship among gender role beliefs, self-silencing and psychological distress in married women. It was hypothesized that there would be a significant negative relationship between gender role beliefs and self-silencing, a significant positive relationship between self-silencing and psychological distress and a significant negative relationship between gender role beliefs and psychological distress. It was also hypothesized that gender role beliefs would predict self-silencing whereas; self-silencing would mediate the relationship between gender role beliefs and psychological distress. Non- probability convenient sampling strategy was followed to recruit sample of N = 150 married women between the age range of 20 to 60 years. Urdu version of Gender Role Beliefs Scale (Michael & Nancy, 2012), Silencing the Self Scale (Dana, 1991) and Psychological Distress Scale (Kessler, 2012) were used for data collection. Pearson product moment correlation, PROCESS macro and independent sample t-test were applied to generate results which showed a significant negative relationship between gender role beliefs and self-silencing, a significant positive relationship between self-silencing and psychological distress as well as a significant negative relationship between gender role beliefs and psychological distress. It was also found that gender role beliefs significantly predicted self-silencing and self-silencing played a significant meditational role between gender role beliefs and psychological distress. The findings of current study might be helpful for family and marital counselors to deal with the marital problems and issues of women as well as by clinical psychologists for designing group or individual clinical interventions to reduce psychological distress in married women.
Keywords: Gender role beliefs, self-silencing, psychological distress, married women.
