Development of the heteronormative attitudes and beliefs scale

Abstract

Heteronormativity has been defined as the enforced compliance with culturally determined heterosexual roles and assumptions about heterosexuality as ‘natural’ or ‘normal’. Cross-disciplinary theoretical literature suggests that heteronormativity may be linked to a range of attitudes, social phenomena and outcomes and that it may be a fundamental prerequisite for institutional and interpersonal manifestations of heterosexism. Yet, this construct is in need of empirical elaboration. Operationalising heteronormativity along two dimensions (essential, binary beliefs about sex and gender and normative behavioural attitudes), this article describes initial development of the Heteronormative Attitudes and Beliefs Scale. Across three studies, this newly developed measure has demonstrated an adequately supported two-factor model, expected group differences (e.g., higher scores among men vs. women and among heterosexual vs. sexual minority participants) and significant correlations with relevant personality and attitudinal variables such as right-wing authoritarianism, openness to experience (OE), attitudes towards sexual minorities and tolerance of ambiguity. In addition to establishing further construct validity and replication of the observed factor structure with more racially, ethnically and socioeconomically diverse samples, future research could more closely examine the potential causes, consequences and malleability of heteronormativity.

Keywords:

• heteronormativity
• heterosexism
• sexual orientation
• attitudes
• authoritarianism
• personality measures

Acknowledgements

I thank David Winter for invaluable contributions and comments on earlier versions of this paper. I also thank Karin Martin, Abigail Stewart, Christopher Peterson and Peter Goldblum for constructive feedback; Robert Wickham for statistical consultation; and Nicola Curtin, Sara Konrath, Chelsea Goforth, Wendy D’Andrea-Mirkin, James Hansell, Wendy Flanigan and Nikhil Majumdar for instrumental contributions to these studies.

Notes

^1. See Costa, Bandeira, and Nardi (2013) for a systematic review of relevant measures.

^2. See Schlichter (2007) and Seidman (2009) for relevant feminist, queer and lesbian theoretical discourse.

^3. All students in Studies 1 and 2 were working towards a bachelor’s degree. In the United States, this involves roughly 4 years of full-time postsecondary education, with course numbers from 100 to 400 indicating level of difficulty.

^4. One participant reporting an age of 33 was not included in data analyses.

^5. Of 489 people who answered at least one HABS item, five were removed from the final analyses because they responded to three or fewer items. The remaining 484 participants had responded to at least 13 out of 16 HABS items.

^6. Despite its publication date, this measure remains the most widely used and well-established measure of ambiguity tolerance (see Buhr & Dugas, 2006; Furnham, 1994; Grenier, Barrette, & Ladouceur, 2005).

^7. Because current financial situation might be a misleading indicator of SES for graduate and professional students, I analysed all data both with and without students and observed no significant differences in the results.

^8. Study 1, unlike Studies 2 and 3, did not yield support for the model’s goodness of fit (χ²(101) = 216.63, p < 0.001; CFI = 0.85; RMSEA = 0.12). However, the sample likely had low power to detect goodness of fit via CFA.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by grants from the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and the Department of Psychology at The University of Michigan. All studies represented in this article were approved by the University of Michigan’s Institutional Review Board. Segments of an earlier version of this paper were presented at the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.

Notes on contributors

Janice M. Habarth

Janice Habarth is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Palo Alto University, Palo Alto, CA, USA.