Criminal Justice Students’ Attitudes Toward LGBTQ Individuals and LGBTQ Police Officers

Abstract

Despite increasing acceptance of LGBTQ individuals in America, homophobia and homophobic attitudes among police officers are still a concern. Both LGBTQ individuals and LGBTQ officers report harassment and discrimination at the hands of police officers. Empirical evidence suggests that these homophobic attitudes are evident among students preparing for criminal justice careers. A number of studies have found that those who plan on law enforcement careers are significantly more homophobic. The current study sought to explore criminal justice students’ attitudes toward LGBTQ individual and LGBTQ police officers. Pursuant to a survey of criminal justice majors at a large public university, findings suggest that males pursuing a law enforcement track expressed the most homophobia and homophobic attitudes. Further statistical analysis indicated that gender, not the law enforcement track, predicts homophobia and homophobic attitudes.

Notes

¹ The authors note that the Homophobia Scale uses outdated terminology and might not be the best suited scale for measuring heterosexism. However, the scale was chosen as it contained three subscales that were of interest to the researchers.

² Forty-two (10.2%) students failed to indicate whether they were majors or minors. Students must be majors or minors to enroll in most criminal justice classes. Only Introduction to Criminal Justice and Introduction to Criminology are open to non-majors.

³ One question from the original instrument was inadvertently left out of the instrument in the data collection for this study. However, Cronbach’s alpha coefficients revealed a high level of inter-item reliability for the scale overall, and for each of the three subscales.

⁴ No subjects identified as transgender.

⁵ Effect sizes were calculated using a publically available effect size calculator published by Dr. P.D. Ellis (2010) (available at http://www.effectsizefaq.com) accessed on 20 June 2017.

⁶ It should be noted that the survey did not include an employment question, and some of the students in the sample may have been full-time students who had not yet held a job.

⁷ T-tests were also run separately for males and for females to determine whether career plan (law enforcement or not) was significantly predictive of HS, HAS or any of the three HS subscale scores. The results of this series of t-tests simply confirmed that career aspirations do not have an impact on any of the dependent variables considered in the analysis.

⁸ Olivero and Murataya (2001) indicated they tried to separate out gender, but the sample size was too small. They had 84 law enforcement track students, 89% of whom were male.