Homophobic Attitudes and Associated Factors Among Adolescents: A Comparison of Six Latin American Countries

ABSTRACT

Homophobic attitudes are still very common in the world, although there are large differences between countries. This study analyzed the responses of almost 30,000 8th- and 9th-grade students from six countries who participated in the Latin American component of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study. Higher levels of homophobia were found in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Paraguay than in Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. Homophobic attitudes were positively associated with being male, having lower levels of empathy, spending less time with friends and the media, having aggressive attitudes, and being more religious, in particular non-Catholic Christian.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescents
• attitudes
• bullying
• empathy
• homophobia
• Latin America
• religion

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), the Regional System for the Development and Evaluation of Citizenship Competencies (SREDECC), and the Colombian Institute for Educational Evaluation (ICFES) for making available the data with which this study was conducted. We also thank José Fernando Mejía (Convivencia Productiva) and Carolina Lopera (ICFES) for providing information about the details of the development and validation of the survey. We are very grateful to Madeleine Barrera, Maria Paula Chaparro, and Daniela Trujillo for their very useful comments and suggestions to previous versions of this manuscript. We also thank the editor and the three anonymous reviewers for their very relevant comments and suggestions.

Funding

The writing of the article was made possible by a Georg Forster Fellowship granted to the first author by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany.

Notes

^1. The original version (in Spanish) of this and all other measures can be made available by request to the first author.

^2. Since the homophobic attitudes factor is standardized (mean = 0; std = 1), a difference of 0.5 is equivalent to a difference of half a standard deviation.

Additional information

Funding

The writing of the article was made possible by a Georg Forster Fellowship granted to the first author by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany.