NOT WANTED IN THE INBOX!: EVALUATIONS OF UNSOLICITED AND HARASSING E‐MAIL

This study was designed as a first step to explore sexual harassment in the electronic domain. One hundred six students read 10 e‐mail messages ranging from jokes to spam to a sexual proposition from a stranger and rated them on an offensiveness evaluative scale. Participants also completed social d...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Psychology of women quarterly 2004-09, Vol.28 (3), p.204-214
Main Authors: Khoo, Pek Ne, Y. Senn, Charlene
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acceptance
Attitudes
Canada
Communication
Electronic Mail
Electronic mail systems
Email
Evaluation
Familiarity
Females
Feminism
Feminist psychology
Gender
Gender Differences
Internet
Jokes
Males
Measures (Individuals)
Psychology
Sexual Harassment
Social Desirability
Strangers
Tolerance
Womens studies
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This study was designed as a first step to explore sexual harassment in the electronic domain. One hundred six students read 10 e‐mail messages ranging from jokes to spam to a sexual proposition from a stranger and rated them on an offensiveness evaluative scale. Participants also completed social desirability and attitudes toward sexual harassment scales. Messages with sexual content were generally perceived less favourably than e‐mail without such content. Gender was critical to the experience of receiving many types of e‐mail messages. When the e‐mail content was perceived to be offensive, women found it more offensive than did men. Marked gender differences emerged in response to the sexual proposition, which women perceived to be extremely offensive while men rated it as somewhat enjoyable. Tolerance of sexual harassment and familiarity with a type of e‐mail were also related to lower offensiveness evaluations for some messages.
ISSN:0361-6843
1471-6402
DOI:10.1111/j.1471-6402.2004.00137.x