LATENT STRUCTURE OF GENDER ATTITUDES IN URBAN AND RURAL ADOLESCENTS

Abstract

Adolescence serves as a demographic turnover point during which emerging individuals assimilate prevailing gender beliefs and social hierarchies into durable self-representations and anticipatory role enactments. This investigation applies a latent-variable analytic template to delineate the dispositional gender-attitude constellations of adolescents embedded within contrasting urban and rural micro-regions. The model is oriented toward partitioning the relative contributions of geographic milieu and sociocultural architecture to the divergence observed in three axial domains: normative assertions regarding prescriptive gender roles, consonance with equity-oriented mandates, and the design of gender-inflected identity trajectories. The analysis prioritises a locality-comparative lens by tracing the mutual entanglement of structural, relational, and symbolic capital that differentially scaffolds or circumscribes adolescents’ appropriation and renegotiation of gender imperatives across transiting friendship networks, household micro-structures, and broader institutional domains. Adopting a cross-sectional framework, the investigation recruited a demographically balanced cohort of the male and female adolescent population aged 13–18 years from urban secondary schools and rural educational establishments. A structured instrument, integrating both conventional and contemporary items measuring gender attitudes, was delivered to the sample. The analyzed dataset was first subjected to Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) in order to isolate latent attitudinal dimensions and was subsequently supplemented by Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) to verify the stability of the factor structure across urban and rural strata.

The analysis uncovers a three-factor latent architecture that comprises endorsement of conventional gender roles, openness to role variation, and awareness of equity norms. Factor loadings exhibit geographic variation: urban participants show stronger endorsement of egalitarian ideals, while rural respondents retain a stronger commitment to traditional roles. Socio-demographic moderators, specifically, parental education, habits of media engagement, and the salience of peer affiliations, compound the attitudinal constellation, exposing the iterative interplay of contextual and personal determinants in the solidification of gender-related cognitions. The present investigation broadens the empirical corpus on adolescent maturation by delivering a rigorously calibrated psychometric evaluation calibrated across disparate geographic contexts. These results furnish guidance of pragmatic value to education policymakers, to the architects of gender sensitization curricula, and to those designing community-oriented programmes, thereby endorsing interventions that are finely attuned to the variations of sociocultural contexts and that thereby further gender equity among young people across heterogeneous environments.