What factors influence comfort with same-sex sexuality among undergraduate social work students? Evidence from Taiwan

Abstract

This study examined bachelor of social work students’ attitudes and multiple variables to explore what factors affect students’ attitudes towards gay people in Taiwan. Generally, students felt comfortable with gay people. Heterosexual and male students showed a consistent tendency to feel less comfortable with gay people. Close referents who were same-sex-oriented or accepted gay people had positive influences on students’ comfort with gay people. Importantly, performing well in college-level education on gay and lesbian issues significantly affected students’ attitudes. The new findings have implications for social work educators in terms of designing educational environments and course activities.

Keywords:

• Education
• gay
• lesbian
• sexual orientation
• social work
• Taiwan

Notes

1. That is, compared to females, males are more likely to feel the need to defend their opposite-sex sexual identities by rejecting gay people (Herek, 1988).

2. As noted by an anonymous referee, the interpretation implicitly assumes that students who agree that religious teaching against same-sex sexuality is reasonable believe and are affected by this teaching. The unreported Ramsey regression equation specification error test results indicate that Model 4 is well specified (Ramsey, 1969). This arguably lends support for the assumption. Moreover, the result of the model is not affected by including the interaction of the agreement of the religious teaching and the degree of religiosity.

3. The unreported exogeneity test result does not support the opposite explanation (Gujararati and Porter, 2009).

4. Swank and Raiz (2007) proposed similar suggestions.

5. See Crone and Mackay (2007) for more discussion of these strategies and techniques.