Assessing Politicized Sexual Orientation Identity: Validating the Queer Consciousness Scale

ABSTRACT

Building on psychological theories of motivation for collective action, we introduce a new individual difference measure of queer consciousness, defined as a politicized collective identity around sexual orientation. The Queer Consciousness Scale (QCS) consists of 12 items measuring five aspects of a politicized queer identity: sense of common fate, power discontent, system blame, collective orientation, and cognitive centrality. In four samples of adult women and men of varied sexual orientations, the QCS showed good test-retest and Cronbach’s reliability and excellent known-groups and predictive validity. Specifically, the QCS was positively correlated with identification as a member of the LGBTQ community, political liberalism, personal political salience, and LGBTQ activism and negatively correlated with right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. QCS mediated relationships between several individual difference variables and gay rights activism and can be used with both LGBTQ people and allies.

KEYWORDS:

• Activism
• ally
• gay rights
• group consciousness
• LGBTQ
• personal political salience
• political consciousness
• politicized collective identity
• queer
• sexual orientation

Notes

^aThe options for a 5-point scale are presented. Sliders or other response scales may also be used.