Cross-cultural Comparisons of LGBT Attitudes: A Study of College Students in the United States and Europe

• In Event: 308 - Section on Sociology of Sex and Gender Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 06. Non-heterosexuality: Session I

Abstract

While it is clear that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) individuals face obstacles at universities in both the U.S. and Europe, very few studies have investigated such attitudes from an international comparative perspective. Without understanding how correlates of attitudes toward LGBT individuals are both similar and different across multiple international studies, it is unclear how we can learn to counteract negative prejudices toward these groups. In the current study, we explore how measures of politics and religion affect attitudes toward LGBT individuals using data from four college student samples in the United States and Europe (Oklahoma, N = 829; Texas, N = 162; Italy, N = 218; Spain = 102). All four locations are embedded in heavily religious cultures, but each offer unique political contexts that we argue may contribute to differential attitudes toward LGBT individuals. Results suggest three trends: (1) negative attitudes toward LGBT individuals are more pervasive in Oklahoma than in any of the other university samples and are most positive among Spanish students, (2) negative attitudes toward LGBT individuals are related to political beliefs and religiosity across all four samples, and (3) among measures of political beliefs and religiosity, two items are especially salient in predicting attitudes toward LGBT: political beliefs (measured on a five-point scale from liberal to conservative) and opinions about biblical passages that dictate that “homosexuality is a sin.” Such findings suggest that there are important similarities in prejudices toward LGBT individuals in both the U.S. and Europe.

Authors

• Meredith Gwynne Fair Worthen, University of Oklahoma

• Vittorio Lingiardi, Sapienza University of Rome

• Chiara Caristo, Sapienza University of Rome