Social Interaction Attitudes Toward Gay and Lesbian Peers among Secondary School Students in Taiwan

Proceedings of The 2nd International Conference on Advanced Research in Humanities

Year: 2019

DOI: ‏https://www.doi.org/10.33422/2nd.icarhconf.2019.09.599

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Social Interaction Attitudes Toward Gay and Lesbian Peers among Secondary School Students in Taiwan

Te-Sheng Chang, Chia-Sheng You and Vuong Tran

 

 

ABSTRACT: 

The purpose of this study was to investigate secondary school students’ attitudes toward social interaction with gay and lesbian peers and to compare attitudinal differences between boy and girl students. The sample consisted of 813 (398 boys and 415 girls) students from eight schools in Hualien, Taiwan. The instruments used in this study were: “Attitudes Toward Social Interaction with Gay Peers” and “Attitudes Toward Social Interaction with Lesbian Peers”. Each instrument consisted of three dimensions: “Friendship acceptance (Friendship),” “Identifying with gay or lesbian love (Love),” and “Sympathizing with gay or lesbian peers (Sympathy).” The results of this study indicate that the orders of participants’ mean scores from low to high for the three dimensions of gay and lesbian peers are the same, namely, Love, Friendship, and Sympathy. There is a no significant interaction between participants’ gender and the targets’ sexual orientation on their attitudes toward social interaction with gay and lesbian peers. Both boy and girl students report more negative attitudes toward gay peers than lesbian peers in all the dimensions. Boy students report more negative attitudes towards gay peers and lesbian peers in all the dimensions than girl students. Implications of these findings for future research, programming, institutional support systems, and institutional policies for schools as they affect gay and lesbian students are discussed.

Keywords: gay and lesbian peers; secondary school students; sexual prejudice; social interaction attitudes; Taiwan.