Negotiating Theory When Doing Practice: A Systematic Review of Qualitative Research on Interventions to Reduce Homophobia

ABSTRACT

We performed a systematic review of qualitative research on interventions to reduce homophobia. Specifically, we conducted a thematic analysis of participant feedback given in 30 qualitative and mixed-methods studies. Participants often described interventions as “eye-opening.” However, they also criticized many interventions for their mismatch with the social, historical, or institutional context in which they were conducted. Some participants rejected the interventions altogether, describing them as offensive or disgusting. We drew three conclusions. First, participants not only were actively making sense of the interventions but also were often aware of philosophical and political tensions (especially liberal vs. queer approaches). Second, participants sometimes used the perceived inadequacy of the intervention for the local context as an argument to resist change. Finally, tensions in participant feedback (eye-opening vs. disgusting) can be read as evidence that reducing homophobia is “dirty work”: such work is both vital for society and despised by many.

KEYWORDS:

• Homophobia
• prejudice reduction
• qualitative systematic review
• diversity training
• dirty work
• participant feedback
• attitude change

Acknowledgments

This research was conducted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a doctoral degree by the first author, under the supervision of the second. The authors wish to thank their colleagues at the University of Surrey for commenting on earlier drafts of this article, especially Prof. Chris Fife-Schaw and Dr. Orla Parslow-Breen.

Notes

¹ Note that Lewin wrote long before the use of gender-neutral language was a standard practice.

² We use the term facilitator to refer to the person or people who have conducted an intervention, and researcher for the author(s) of the report. The two roles were sometimes, but not always, fulfilled by the same people.

³ The phrase was first defined by Chicago School work sociologist Everett C. Hughes: “There is a feeling among prison guards and mental hospital attendants that society at large and their superiors hypocritically put upon them dirty work which they, society and the superiors in prison and hospital know is necessary but which they pretend is not necessary” (Hughes, 1981/1958, p. 52).

⁴ A play about the real-life murder of a gay student (Kaufman, 2001).

⁵ A (children’s) picture book about two male penguins raising a chick (Parnell & Richardson, 2005).