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Article Excerpt
Negative attitudes toward gay men and lesbians have become an important topic and research area in social sciences in the last 20 years. Although the issue regarding gay men and lesbian rights is increasingly present in the Chilean public agenda and the Chilean population currently seems to be more tolerant, prejudice and stereotypes toward sexual minorities have not changed much in the last few years, and neither have the discriminating actions deriving from them. It must be remembered that article 365 of the Penalty Code that penalized sexual relations between men was repealed in 1999 during the democratic government post military dictatorship. The unequal treatment toward gay men and lesbians and lack of social protection for homosexual persist in Chilean society when, for example, trying to get a job and using public utility services (MUMS, 2006).
On the other hand, studies about population attitudes toward gay men and lesbians in Chile are scarce and only recently have been studied via very general public opinion surveys in which questions about homosexuality are confined to two or three items or scales, for which reliability and validity indicators were not reported. Therefore, they can be used as illustrations only with due precautions. Data show that there is a particularly strong social intolerance and homophobia regarding homo--and bisexuality in Chile. For example, data from a questionnaire administered by Fundacion IDEAS in 1997 showed that there is a value charge of intolerance and discrimination considered risky on different issues, particularly on homosexuality, which were considered "very serious", with a figure of 60.2% (100% was the maximum, showing very strong prejudice). The second report of this foundation showed that 45.2% of the subjects think that homosexuality should be forbidden since it is against human nature (Fundacion IDEAS, 2001). Most recent results reported by IDEAS show that 50% or more of the population could be regarded as homophobic. IDEAS (2001) defines homophobia as a form of personal or institutional prejudice toward homosexuals that manifests itself as fear or rejection toward physical closeness with them.
Results also indicated that people believed homosexuality should be an important issue in medical research in order to avoid the birth of homosexuals in the future. Moreover, in their last report (Fundacion IDEAS, 2003), 43% of the sample thought that homosexuals should not become school teachers. Other data from a Chilean sexual behavior survey regarding intolerance levels toward homo- and bisexuality showed that, concerning sexual relations between people of the same sex, there are very restrictive judgments, even stricter than for other sexual practices (CONASIDA & ANRS, 2000). Thus, data show that only 5% of the Chilean population approve of men or women who have sexual relations with people of the same sex. Most of the population reports disapproval of homosexuality, both male and female.
Previous studies have examined other factors associated with attitudes toward homosexuality. For example, studies report that negative attitudes toward homosexuality closely correlate with authoritarianism (Dumbar, Brown, & Amoroso, 1973) and political conservatism (Herek, 1988; Hayes, 1995; Steffens & Wagner, 2004). Also, a close relationship is observed between negative attitudes toward homosexuality and traditional attitudes toward gender or sex roles (Herek, 1988; Kite & Deaux, 1986; Morrison & Morrison, 2002). If the subject violating the sex role is a man, transgression is viewed as more serious (Herek, 1984; La Mar & Kite, 1998). Prejudice against gay men and lesbians is related to variables like religiosity (Gentry, 1987; Herek, 1988; Morrison & Morrison, 2002) and attitudes toward feminism (Kite & Deaux, 1986). It also is connected with variables like age: the older the subject, the more negative the attitude; educational level: the higher the educational level, the less the prejudice (Herek, 1988; 1994); and sex: men are more prejudiced than women (Herek, 2000; La Mar & Kite, 1998; Lingiardi, Falanga, & Augelli, 2005).
In a different sense, when a heterosexual population thinks that homosexuality is a choice by subjects themselves, rejection figures tend to be higher (King, 2001; Sakalli, 2002).
Studies also support the idea that people with homosexual relatives, or who have established close relationships with homosexuals, hold more favorable attitudes toward them (Bowen & Bourgeois, 2001; Hinrichs & Rosenberg, 2002; Steffens & Wagner, 2004), and those without these contacts hold more prejudiced attitudes (Lingiardi, Falanga, & Augelli, 2005). Among the latter, men feel more rejection and put more social distance from gay men than from lesbians (King & Black, 1999; Kite & Whitley, 1996; La Mar & Kite, 1998), whereas women report feeling more at ease with gay men than with lesbians (Herek, 1994). Whatever the case, there is a positive correlation between attitudes toward gay men and lesbians (Herek & Capitanio, 1996), and both are evaluated better than bisexuals of their same sex (Steffens & Wagner, 2004). Finally, even in cases in which prejudice is low and attitudes toward homosexuals are rather favorable, subjects do not translate this tendency into a defense of homosexual rights (Ellis & Kitsinger, 2003).
There is no thorough and useful information to learn about attitudes toward gay men and lesbians and their connection to other relevant psychosocial and social variables due to the unavailability of Chilean scales to measure attitudes toward homosexuality consistently and validly.
Therefore, this article is aimed at reporting the phases of the process for adapting and validating the ATLG scale (Herek, 1988). This scale has been translated and validated for samples from various populations and countries, but no studies have been done for its adaptation to the Chilean context. Only recently a study with a Spanish version was done among U.S. residents of Mexican origin (Herek & Gonzalez-Rivera, 2006), but using a 4-item version of the attitudes toward gays (ATG) and attitudes toward lesbians (ATL) scales.
So, the objective of this study was to determine if the ATLG scale is a suitable device to measure prejudice toward gay men and lesbians in our particular social context and to examine the association between those attitudes and theoretically relevant sociodemographic, psychological, and social variables. The following hypotheses were tested:
H1: Chilean men hold more negative attitudes toward homosexuality than do Chilean woman. This difference is greater for attitudes toward gay men than toward lesbians.
H2: Chilean people from various socioeconomic levels express different attitudes toward gay men and lesbians. As this hypothesis is exploratory, the significance of the above-mentioned differences is not given.
H3: Highly religious Chilean population holds more negative attitudes toward homosexuality.
H4: Chilean people politically identified with the Right Wing will have more negative attitudes toward homosexuality.
H5: Chilean people express...
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