Latin American Adolescents’ Attitudes toward Gender Equity and the Mechanisms Underlying it: A Multilevel Latent-Class Framework.

: (Alternative Format Thesis)

Abstract

Gender inequality continues to affect the lives and opportunities of women and girls worldwide, and Latin America remains one of the regions where structural and cultural barriers to gender equity persist most strongly. Adolescence is a formative period for the development of beliefs about gender relations, yet comparatively little is known about how young people in Latin America understand and endorse gender-equity attitudes, or how these attitudes vary across social groups, schools, and national contexts. This thesis investigates adolescents’ attitudes toward gender equity using large-scale survey data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS 2016), integrating conceptual, thematic, and methodological contributions to advance understanding in this area.
The thesis begins with a systematic review of international quantitative research on adolescent gender attitudes (2000–2024). The review highlights substantial geographical and methodological imbalances in the field, including an over-representation of studies from the Global North, limited theoretical anchoring, and a lack of analytical innovation. These findings inform the empirical chapters that follow.
The first empirical study applies Simultaneous Latent Class Analysis to identify profiles of adolescents’ endorsement of gender-equity attitudes across five Latin American countries. Four distinct attitudinal configurations emerge, revealing marked heterogeneity within and between national populations. The subsequent study uses multilevel multinomial models to examine how individual, family, and school characteristics relate to profile membership, showing that both background factors and school climates shape adolescents’ positioning toward gender equity. A further study introduces a contextual-effects framework to estimate how school-level civic learning environments influence individual endorsement of egalitarian attitudes. The final empirical chapter employs a Multilevel Analysis of Individual Heterogeneity and Discriminatory Accuracy (MAIHDA) to investigate how intersecting social positions—gender, socioeconomic resources, and immigrant background—combine to structure attitudinal differences.
Together, these studies demonstrate that gender-equity attitudes among Latin American adolescents are patterned by social inequalities, influenced by school environments, and shaped by intersecting identities. Methodologically, the thesis advances the use of person-centred, contextual, and intersectional approaches in the quantitative study of gender attitudes. Conceptually, it argues for an equity-oriented perspective that recognises unequal starting conditions and the structural roots of gender beliefs.

Date of Award	25 Mar 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Andres Sandoval Hernandez (Supervisor) & Andrea Abbas (Supervisor)