A comparison of African American and White college students' affective and attitudinal reactions to lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals: an exploratory study

Journal of Sex Research, Nov, 2005 by Charles Negy, Russell Eisenman

Culture is believed to influence the way individuals construe their worlds, including both approach and reaction to others and to external events (Angel & Williams, 2000; Hall & Barongan, 2002). Betancourt and Lopez (1993) have suggested that culture be included in any endeavor to understand human behavior in the context of race, ethnicity, and social class. They also indicated that, when ethnic groups are found to differ on study variables, attributing those differences to culture cannot be assumed without having measured aspects of culture thought to be involved in the behavior and controlling for them statistically. We attempted to do this by including an acculturation scale in the set of questionnaires for African Americans. The acculturation scale provides some information about the degree to which African Americans have acculturated toward mainstream White culture, or conversely, have experienced enculturation into traditional African American culture. This allowed us to examine the correlation between African Americans' enculturation/ acculturation and negative reactions to LGBs. It also facilitated the possible disentangling of religiosity from other aspects African American culture regarding their influence of homophobia and homonegativity among African Americans.

Homophobia refers to an affective response, including fear, anxiety, anger, and discomfort, a person experiences when interacting with LGB individuals, which may or may not involve a cognitive component (Adams, Wright, & Lohr, 1996). The cognitive component--sometimes referred to as homonegativity--refers to negative attitudes, beliefs, or actions toward homosexuality (Hudson & Ricketts, 1980). In theory, homophobia and homonegativity are distinct constructs. In reality, however, they likely overlap so much that it is difficult to separate them. In this study, we elected to include a separate measure for each type of negative reaction (affective and cognitive) to LGBs to ensure that we adequately assessed both constructs, and because it is conceivable that individuals may be homophobic but not homonegative, or vice versa.

Because questions designed to measure negative affect and attitudes toward LGBs may elicit socially desirable responses, a measure of social desirability was included in this study so that the response set of social desirability could be taken into consideration in the comparative data analyses. Also, although enculturation and acculturation refer to opposite ends of the same continuum, we elected to use the term enculturation in this paper to reflect our interest in African Americans' immersion and socialization into African American culture. Age, gender, class standing, and the educational attainment of their parents were included in the analyses in order to provide additional descriptive information about the participants and as a means for knowing if the two ethnic groups differed on these variables. Any of these variables on which the two groups differed was treated as a covariate in subsequent analyses. Lastly, two measures of religiosity were included in the study--frequency of church attendance and commitment to religion--because religiosity commonly has been found to predict negative reactions to LGBs (Fisher, Derison, Polley, Cadman, & Johnston, 1994; Larson, Reed, & Hoffman, 1980).