A Cross-Sectional Survey Study on Homophobia Among Medical, Nursing, Pharmacy, and Other Health Sciences Students

ABSTRACT

Since the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) community may be exposed to violence, discrimination, stigma, exclusion, and maltreatment due to their sexual orientation while accessing healthcare services, understanding, and improving the attitudes of future’s health care professionals toward LGBTI individuals seem essential. This descriptive and cross-sectional study aimed to investigate the homophobia among medical, nursing, pharmacy, and healthcare sciences students and examine the related factors. The study included 2,531 students from medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and other health sciences (midwifery, nutrition and dietetics, physiotherapy, management of healthcare facilities) disciplines. Homophobia was measured with the Hudson and Ricketts Homophobia Scale. After getting ethical and institutional approvals, data were collected and analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistical tests. Medical students had the lowest homophobia score, and their mean score was significantly lower than other students. There was a significant difference between students’ scores according to years of study, age, sex, acquaintance with LGBTI individuals, providing healthcare services to an LGBTI person, and opinions on providing care. Although homophobia scores of nursing, pharmacy, and other health sciences students were lower than the medical students’, policies and expansive content regarding LGBTI should be in place in all health science educational institutes, including medical schools, to prevent students from holding homophobic and prejudicial attitudes against LGBTI individuals.

KEYWORDS:

• Medical student
• nursing student
• pharmacy student
• health sciences student
• LGBTI
• homophobia

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the students who participated in this study and to the administrators of the faculties who made this study possible.

Each author presented in the authors list contributed to the study. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. Conceptualization: Arzu Kader Harmancı Seren, Hanife Çakır, and Sevil Yılmaz Methodology: Arzu Kader Harmancı Seren, Hanife Çakır Formal analysis and investigation: Feride Eşkin Bacaksız, Suzan Turan and Nurten Maghsoudi Writing - original draft preparation: Arzu Kader Harmancı Seren, Hanife Çakır Writing - review and editing: Feride Eşkin Bacaksız, Sevil Yılmaz, Özge Sükut Supervision: Arzu Kader Harmancı Seren.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The authors did not use any source of funding from public or private institutions for performing this study.