A STUDY ON PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF CLOTHING AMONGST WOMEN AND TRANS WOMEN

A trans woman is someone who was born male but has a female sexual orientation and adopts the clothing and lifestyle of that of women. It comes under the broad spectrum of transgender which is referred to as the third gender. There have been no studies on the clothing preferences of trans women till now in India. The present study intended to see the impact of psychological aspects of clothing preferences on women and trans women. For the purpose, three objectives were framed -to study the impact of gender i.e. women and trans-women on the dimension of the interest level, attention while shopping and attractive packaging when it comes to things related to clothing. Further three hypotheses were framed-that there will be a significant association between the gender and responses related to the objectives of the study. To conduct this study, the related literature on clothing practices, psychological aspects of clothing, trans wom en status and consumer behavior was reviewed. The survey method was adopted for data collection. Purposive random sampling method in combination with snowball technique is used to select the samples for the study. A total number of 400 samples were selected among which 200 were women and 200 were trans women. The age group of the subjects selected for the study was 22 to 50 years. Factorial research design was used to see the impact of gender on the psychological aspects of clothing preferences i.e. interest level when shopping, attention paid while shopping and attractive packaging during shopping. Data was analyzed using frequency method, percentage method and chi-square. The results show that there was a significant association between gender and responses pertaining to the pre-tested questions. This paper projects the relation between women and trans women on psychological aspects of clothing preferences.