Homophobic attitudes among young people towards gay men and lesbians

Abstract

Homophobia is a social problem that is far from disappearing and instead seems to adapt to the current times becoming a much more subtle forms that are explained for personal factors. The aim of this study is to find out the levels of homophobia among young people. For this, a sample of 601 university and vocational training students ranging from 17.46 to 34.47 years old (M = 22.47, SD = 2.96) was selected, of which 65.1% are women, who were administered the Modern Homphobia Scale (Raja & Stokes, 1998) validated the Spanish for Rodriguez, Lameiras, Carrera & Vallejo (2013). Even though homophobia levels of participants are low, there are significant differences between the groups, according to their characteristics. The factorial ANOVA analysis showed that the greater levels of homophobic attitudes are explained as be a man, not college, not having gay friends and being in the beginning courses of the branch of knowledge of sciences and experimental. The conclusions underline the importance of training to promote positive attitudes toward homosexual persons.