Comparison of male and female college students' interpretations of physical characteristics, socioeconomic status, and personality traits evoked by selected women's fashions

The purposes of this study were to ascertain whether individuals ascribe physical characteristics, socioeconomic status, and personality traits to perceived persons based on clothing worn and whether significant differences occur between males and females in terms of the number and types of comments evoked by clothing. The randomly selected respondents were 25 male and 25 female undergraduate students. Comments made by respondents relative to four selected women's dress designs were analyzed using a Type I analysis of variance (Lindquist, 1956). Hypotheses 1(A), 2(A), and 3(A) were confirmed based on the fact that the dress designs did evoke comments pertaining to the response categories of physical characteristics, socioeconomic status, and personality traits of individuals who would wear the designs. Data were significant at the .01 level confirming hypotheses 1(B), 2(B), and 3(B) that the four designs would evoke different numbers of comments for the response categories. Hypothesis 4, that differences would exist between male and female respondents in terms of total numbers of comments evoked within a response category, was not confirmed. Hypothesis 5 was partially confirmed based on the fact that significant interaction between sex and design was found to occur in the category of physical characteristics