Roberta Sigel

Roberta S. Sigel (January 6, 1916—October 25, 2008) was an American political scientist. Her research focused on political psychology, political socialization, and gender and politics. She extended research into the political socialization of children and adolescents to study how people learn about politics and develop their political orientations throughout adulthood. She spent much of her career as a distinguished professor of political science at Rutgers University.

Early life and education Sigel was born in Berlin on January 6, 1916. Her year of birth has also been given as 1917. In the mid-1930s, Sigel and Hoskin examine the contributors to the political socialization of adolescents, asking what causes young people to become engaged in politics. The communications professor Timothy E. Cook commented that their view of engagement was unusually broad, encompassing not just the typical indicators of political attitudes but including emotional, cognitive, and behavioral features.

In the early 1990s, Sigel began to work on the question of gender and politics, which represented a new direction in her research and resulted in the 1996 book Ambition and accommodation: How women view gender relations. The book made novel use of open-ended focus group interviews with 650 New Jersey residents to understand how men and women perceived the state of gender relations while they were undergoing dramatic changes. Beginning with the two hypotheses that men and women had largely moved past the traditional assumptions of men's innate superiority to women, but also that women still nevertheless were treated in many ways as though they were inferior to men, Sigel examined whether or not women felt aggrieved by their unfair treatment, and aimed to discover whom they blamed for it and whether it would prompt them to pursue collective action. The women interviewed in Ambition and accommodation largely did express aggrievement, but both women and men were more likely to blame the individual actions of men rather than systemic biases for women's negative experiences, and consequently many women in the study group favored individual responses to the problem and were not motivated to pursue political remedies.

Sigel was involved in the leadership of several political psychology organizations. She has been credited with the idea for the New York Area Political Psychology Meeting, and she was the President of the International Society of Political Psychology.

Sigel retired in 1987, but continued to be active in research until she died in 2009.

Selected works The political involvement of adolescents, with Marilyn Hoskin (1981) Political learning in adulthood: A sourcebook of theory and research, editor (1989) Ambition and accommodation: How women view gender relations (1996)