Gender relations and social media: a grounded theory inquiry of young Vietnamese women’s self-presentations on Facebook

Since the introduction of Đổi Mới (market economic reforms) in 1986, Vietnam has experienced rapid social, cultural, economic and technological changes. The purpose of this study is to explore the nexus between gender relations and social media with a focus on how young urban Vietnamese women present themselves on Facebook. Grounded theory was employed to inquire into this phenomenon, revealing that the participants use various self-presentation techniques (strategies) including an ideal appearance, competency (mastery) and a positive image. The participants’ self-presentations were found to be simultaneously influenced by Confucian ethics, socialist ideology and neoliberal global culture. The intersection of these social forces has changed the nature of gender relations and expectations for young Vietnamese women, leading to the emergence of a neoliberal gendered self in their presentations on Facebook. This study foregrounds how gender relations in early twenty-first century Vietnam are being reconfigured by competing values and how these can be analyzed through and influenced by social media use

Measuring Attitudes About Intimate Partner Violence Against Women: The ATT-IPV Scale

In lower-income settings, women more often than men justify intimate partner violence (IPV). Yet, the role of measurement invariance across gender is unstudied. We developed the ATT-IPV scale to measure attitudes about physical violence against wives in 1,055 married men and women ages 18-50 in My Hao district, Vietnam. Across 10 items about transgressions of the wife, women more often than men agreed that a man had good reason to hit his wife (3 % to 92 %; 0 % to 67 %). In random split-half samples, one-factor exploratory factor analysis (EFA) (N 1 = 527) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) (N 2 = 528) models for nine items with sufficient variability had significant loadings (0.575-0.883; 0.502-0.897) and good fit (RMSEA = 0.068, 0.048; CFI = 0.951, 0.978, TLI = 0.935, 0.970). Three items had significant uniform differential item functioning (DIF) by gender, and adjustment for DIF revealed that measurement noninvariance was partially masking men’s lower propensity than women to justify IPV. A CFA model for the six items without DIF had excellent fit (RMSEA = 0.019, CFI = 0.994, TLI = 0.991) and an attitudinal gender gap similar to the DIF-adjusted nine-item model, suggesting that the six-item scale reliably measures attitudes about IPV across gender. Researchers should validate the scale in urban Vietnam and elsewhere and decompose DIF-adjusted gender attitudinal gaps