ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the assumption that ethnic identity may be as important as gender identity as cause and consequence of interethnic marriage. Spence's multifactorial gender identity theory arguably represents the most comprehensive attempt to catalog the major dimensions of personality that are associated with gender differences versus similarities. Unlike research on gender identity, research on ethnic identity has been influenced primarily by Erik Erikson's ego psychology. Both multifactorial gender identity theory and gender schema theory arguably are compatible with a bidirectional model of gender identity and interethnic marriage in the tradition of George Herbert Mead's social behaviorism and Erving Goffman's interactionist role theory. Spence's conclusions regarding the demonstrated ability of many individual men and individual women to reject versus accept traditional roles to varying degrees in the post–Women's Rights Era are compatible with the symbolic interactionist perspective that is contained within Mead's social behaviorism.
