Authors: Viridian Hellebore, Isabella Rodriguez, Stockton Palmer, Sim Perry, Justine Padilla
Mentors: Kirsten L Graham
Insitution: Southern Utah University
The examination of attitudes towards the LGBTQ+ community presents a newly found psychological concept that plays an important role in fostering social inclusion, reducing discrimination, and promoting a more accepting society. The purpose of our study is to create a measure that will assess a person's general attitudes towards the LGBTQ+ community. In the current social and political climate of the US, there are a multitude of differing thoughts, opinions, and feelings regarding the community- some that are positive, and some that are negative. Current and past research generally only focus on sexuality, requiring the need for a scale that includes all members of the LGBTQ+ community. Such past works include Attitudes Toward Lesbians and Gays Scale (Herek 1988) as well as the Index of Attitudes Toward Homosexuals (Hudson & Ricketts 1980). The Attitudes regarding Gender and Sexuality Scale (AGSS) was created to provide a single scale that will measure a variety of attitudes towards the LGBTQ+ community. The AGSS covers fear, understanding, and tolerance- related aspects of these attitudes. Before releasing the scale to the general public, the scale was given to five subjects to assess for face validity. Participants will be recruited from MTurk and social media, and will be asked to respond to 21 questions that envelop the above aspects of attitudes. The participants will answer the “Gender/Sex Diversity Scale'' (Sudson, 2022) alongside AGSS to test for construct validity. The participants will also be asked to answer two scales that are measuring different constructs to test for discriminant validity. Once all of the data has been collected a confirmatory factor analysis will be ran. To test for reliability, we will be using the internal consistency method. For this we will be testing for Cronbach’s coefficient alpha since our scale using a 7-point Likert scale. We hypothesize that AGSS will be able to measure both negative and positive attitudes that are directed towards the LGBTQ+ community. With these results further research could be conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of anti-discrimination laws, the reasoning behind these attitudes, and how the attitudes affect the wellbeing of the LGBTQ+ community.