Gender role and justice attitudes through the prisms of religion and religiosity

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Stefan Liebig
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 561121941

Extant research on gender role attitudes is lacking in several ways. Most available survey measures of gender role attitudes suffer from inadequate attention to men’s roles in the home, and are not adapted to reflect contemporary shifts in family behavior. Further, we propose that the research could benefit from a theoretical foundation. We suggest that studying gender role attitudes from the perspective of social justice theory clarifies that gender role attitudes are essentially ideas about how benefits and burdens should be shared in a partnership, and whether such divisions are considered fair. The justice literature is useful in the family context, as it explicitly considers gender relations (the social relationships under consideration), normative justice attitudes (how benefits and burdens – rewards and responsibilities – should be distributed between partners), and evaluative justice attitudes of what is considered fair or just between partners. Moreover, the justice literature is relevant to understanding how gender role attitudes may vary across religion and religiosity population groups, as these groups may differ according to social understandings of partnerships, endowments, and comparison groups. We will develop and operationalize typologies of gender role attitudes in two stages. First, we will analyze extant data sources (EVS/WVS, GSS, ESS) to study associations between gender role attitudes and justice attitudes, within and across religious groups in diverse countries. Then, we will address the relationships between gender role attitudes and justice attitudes through the prism of religion and religiosity in Germany and Israel. We will conduct a survey with multifactorial experiments (factorial survey design) using nationally representative, probability samples of individuals drawn from population registers in Germany (N=3000) and Israel (N=1400) at the end of 2027. The survey will include four innovative elements: (1) vignette modules on the distribution of benefits and burdens within the domestic sphere; (2) a focus on time as a resource that is distributed across paid work, unpaid work, and leisure time; (3) new, theory-driven gender role items; (4) an instrument measuring the perceptions of the type of social relationship within the partnership; and (5) measures of religiosity that go beyond affiliation, individual religiosity, and religious practices, to include religious cognition and religiosity within social networks. The country settings of Germany and Israel, together with an oversampling of religious minorities in both countries, will allow us to leverage between- and within-country heterogeneity in religion and religiosity, cultural traditions, family structures, and social institutions and policies. The data from this survey will be made available to the scientific community for further use in 2029.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Israel
• Partner Organisation: The Israel Science Foundation
• Cooperation Partners: Professorin Barbara S. Okun, Ph.D.; Dr. Liat Raz-Yurovich