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

Because of the contradictory empirical literature on African Americans' and Whites' reactions to LGBs, and because of the exploratory nature of this study on how enculturation and religiosity may conjointly influence negative reactions to LGBs among African Americans, we did not make any formal hypotheses.

METHOD

Participants

Seventy African Americans (22 males, 48 females) and 143 non-Hispanic Whites (38 males, 105 females) attending a public university in the southeastern region of the United States participated in the study. Their mean ages were 18.65 years for African Americans (SD = 1.05) and 18.36 years for Whites (SD = .81). Almost all of the participants were freshmen or sophomores, and the vast majority of African Americans (90%) and Whites (94%) reported that their sexual orientation was either exclusively or mostly heterosexual. Also, 89% of African American participants indicated that their religious affiliation was Christianity (48% Baptist, 30% Other Christian, and 11% Catholic), and 76% of White respondents indicated their religion to be Christianity (35% Catholic, 27% Other Christian, and 14% Baptist). All of the participants were from general psychology classes and had volunteered to participate for extra credit.

Instruments

Participants completed the following questionnaires.

Demographic sheet. On a single page, participants indicated age, gender, self-designated ethnicity, and level of education attained by each parent. The number of years of education by whichever parent had the highest education was used in the analyses, serving as an index of socioeconomic status (SES) for each participant. They also indicated their religious affiliation and their class standing based on the number of hours of college courses already completed at the time of the study, using a 4-point scale. Finally, the participants indicated their sexual orientation on a 7-point Likert scale, with responses ranging from 1 (exclusively heterosexual) to 7 (exclusively homosexual).

Religiosity. We used two measures to assess participants' commitment to religion. One measure required respondents to indicate the frequency with which they attended church; this index of religiosity is commonly used by other researchers (e.g., Davidson, Darling, & Norton, 1995). The other measure consisted of 7 items assessing respondents' intrinsic reasons for believing in a religion and was created by Batson, Schoenrade, and Ventis (1993). Among our sample of African American and White participants, this scale obtained Cronbach's alphas of .78 and .92, respectively.

Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding. The Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR; Paulhus, 1988, 1991) was included in the set of questionnaires to assess the response set of social desirability. The BIDR contains 40 items to which respondents indicate their agreement using a 7-point Likert scale. The BIDR measures two constructs. One construct, self-deceptive enhancement, assesses the tendency to respond honestly to items, but in a positively biased manner. The other construct, impression management, assesses a deliberate self-presentation and can be viewed as a measure of defensiveness. The BIDR was scored in accordance to instructions by Paulhus. Only extreme responses to the items comprised the person's total score, with higher scores reflecting higher levels of socially desirable responses. Reliabilities for the BIDR range from .67 (test-retest; 5-week interval) to .83 (Cronbach's alpha). Further, the BIDR has been found to correlate .71 with the Marlowe-Crowne scale and .80 with the Multidimensional Social Desirability Inventory of Jacobson, Kellogg, Cause, and Slavin (1977). Among our sample of African American and White participants, this scale obtained Cronbach's alphas of .81 and .79, respectively.