Homosexism Scale – Short form

1. Abstract

The Homosexism Scale – Short form (HS-SF) is a psychometric instrument developed by Gary L. Hansen to operationalize and evaluate negative attitudes, prejudice, and discriminatory orientations directed toward gay and lesbian individuals. Originating from Hansen’s seminal 1982 psychometric assessment of prejudice against homosexuality among university populations, the scale was constructed as an alternative to conceptualizations of anti-gay hostility that relied exclusively on clinical models of irrational fear or individual psychopathology (traditionally termed homophobia). Instead, the instrument adopts an ideological framework that parallels sociological formulations of racism and sexism, classifying anti-gay attitudes as a culturally reinforced system of social prejudice termed homosexism.

The short form comprises 15 self-report items administered via a 5-point Likert-type response format, ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 5 (Strongly Agree). Psychometrically, the scale operates primarily as an essentially unidimensional measure, capturing variance across key attitudinal manifestations, including: endorsement of institutional discrimination, interpersonal avoidance and social distance, civil rights and employment parity, moral-theological condemnation, and stereotypic perceptions of threat to youth and social institutions. Across empirical validation studies, the HS-SF has consistently demonstrated exceptional internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha coefficients regularly exceeding α = .88 to .93) and robust convergent validity through established associations with Right-Wing Authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, traditional gender role adherence, and hostile attitudes toward sexual assault survivors. The HS-SF remains a cornerstone measurement tool in social psychology, legal studies, sociological inquiry, and victimology for examining structural prejudice, intergroup relations, and the sociopolitical determinants of sexual stigma.

2. Keywords

Homosexism Scale, HS-SF, sexual prejudice, homophobia measurement, heterosexism, social distance, attitude measurement, psychometrics, Gary L. Hansen, sexual stigma, anti-gay prejudice, scale validation

3. Authors

The Homosexism Scale was designed and validated by Gary L. Hansen. At the time of the instrument’s initial validation and publication in 1982, Dr. Hansen was affiliated with the Department of Sociology at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, United States. His scholarly contributions have primarily concentrated on sociology of the family, interpersonal relationships, gender role ideology, intergroup prejudice, and the structural dynamics of social attitudes.

4. Purpose

The central purpose of the Homosexism Scale – Short form is to provide an empirically rigorous, standardized self-report inventory for measuring the degree of institutional, interpersonal, and cultural prejudice that an individual holds toward homosexual individuals and their civil integration. Developed in an era marked by shifting psychiatric and social definitions—following the American Psychiatric Association’s 1973 declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder—there arose an acute need for psychometric instruments that could systematically evaluate heteronormative hostility without pathologizing the prejudice itself as an innate, uncontrollable medical phobia.

Research Applications

In empirical research, the HS-SF serves multiple critical functions:

• Sociopolitical and Legal Inquiries: Assessing public resistance or support regarding civil rights legislation, marriage equality, employment non-discrimination acts, adoption protections, and military inclusion for sexual minorities.
• Intergroup Relations and Social Cognition: Investigating the social-cognitive mechanisms of outgroup derogation, stereotype maintenance, implicit bias correlation, and the contact hypothesis (evaluating how intergroup contact reduces homosexist prejudice).
• Victimology and Criminological Studies: Analyzing victim blaming in violent crimes. For example, extensive research utilized the HS-SF to demonstrate that individuals exhibiting elevated levels of homosexism attribute higher levels of blame and lower credibility to male rape victims, particularly when the victim’s sexual orientation is manipulated in experimental vignettes.
• Educational and Intervention Assessment: Evaluating the efficacy of educational curricula, diversity workshops, and university interventions designed to decrease sexual stigma and foster inclusive campus climates.

Clinical and Applied Rationale

Although predominantly employed as an empirical research instrument, the scale offers significant diagnostic utility in institutional and organizational settings. Within organizational psychology, the HS-SF can be implemented anonymously to audit workplace climate, assess unconscious organizational barriers, and inform targeted cultural-competence trainings. In counselor and clinical psychologist training programs, the instrument is frequently employed as a reflective self-assessment tool to assist trainees in identifying latent personal biases that could inadvertently impede the therapeutic alliance when working with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) clients.

5. Psychological Construct

The primary construct quantified by the scale is homosexism. Conceptualized in direct analogy to racism and sexism, homosexism denotes a multidimensional constellation of cognitive beliefs, affective aversions, and behavioral intentions that systematically devalue, subordinate, and disenfranchise individuals who engage in same-sex attraction or identify as homosexual. Rather than characterizing negative responses as idiosyncratic neurotic anxieties (as implied by George Weinberg’s 1972 formulation of homophobia), the construct of homosexism reflects an internalized ideological doctrine that upholds heterosexuality as the sole legitimate, natural, and morally sanctioned manifestation of human sexuality.

The 15 items of the short form comprehensively sample several foundational dimensions underlying the broader homosexist construct:

1. Civil Rights, Legal Status, and Institutional Equality

This facet assesses the respondent’s posture toward formal socio-legal parity. It captures whether an individual believes that homosexual persons are entitled to the same systemic rights, civil protections, and occupational opportunities enjoyed by heterosexual citizens. Items addressing this dimension focus on non-discrimination in employment, eligibility to hold high government offices and leadership positions, and the legal status of consensual same-sex acts. High homosexism in this domain manifests as an active endorsement of structural disenfranchisement and legal subjugation.

2. Social Distance and Interpersonal Avoidance

Deriving from classic sociological constructs of social distance (e.g., Bogardus, 1925), this dimension measures the willingness of an individual to interact with homosexual persons across varying gradients of intimacy. Measured settings include residential proximity (e.g., objecting to having a homosexual neighbor), professional proximity (e.g., reluctance to work alongside a gay colleague), and personal social spheres (e.g., willingness to dissolve a friendship upon learning that the friend is gay). Elevated scores reflect a profound desire for spatial and social segregation to prevent symbolic or physical contamination.

3. Moral, Theological, and Normative Condemnation

This component taps into theological and absolute moral doctrines that categorize same-sex behavior as intrinsically sinful, unnatural, or corrupt. Grounded in conservative religious orthodoxy, this dimension measures the degree to which an individual views male and female homosexuality as transgressive affronts against divine law or biological design, independent of individual character or civic contribution.

4. Perceived Threat to Youth and Vulnerable Populations

A persistent cultural trope of heterosexist ideology involves the unfounded conflation of homosexuality with moral contagion, social degeneration, and danger to children. This dimension assesses beliefs regarding whether homosexual individuals pose a threat to youth or whether they should be permitted to foster and adopt children. High scores indicate an adherence to societal scapegoating narratives that depict sexual minorities as predatory or socially corrupting.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the Homosexism Scale is grounded in modern social-psychological and sociological models of prejudice, intergroup conflict, and ideological cognition.

Ideological Parallelism: From Phobia to Structural Prejudice

Historically, the term homophobia was introduced into clinical vernacular by George Weinberg in 1972 to denote an irrational fear, dread, or hatred of homosexuals. While groundbreaking in shifting the focus of psychological scrutiny away from the homosexual individual toward the person holding the anti-gay attitude, scholars soon recognized the theoretical limitations of a phobic model. Phobias imply an involuntary, ego-dystonic psychopathological reaction marked by autonomic hyperarousal, whereas anti-gay hostility is typically an ego-syntonic, socially reinforced, and ideologically justified worldview.

Hansen (1982) formulated the Homosexism Scale to align with sociological models of prejudice that conceptualize hostility as an ideology of dominance. Paralleling Gordon Allport’s (1954) foundational treatise The Nature of Prejudice, homosexism is viewed as an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization, directed toward a group as a whole or toward an individual because they are a member of that group. In subsequent years, this framework was further refined by Gregory Herek (1990, 2000), who differentiated between cultural heterosexism (societal ideologies and institutions that deny and denigrate any non-heterosexual form of behavior or identity) and psychological heterosexism / sexual prejudice (an individual’s negative attitude toward an individual based on their sexual orientation).

Authoritarianism and Social Dominance

The theoretical framework also interfaces directly with personality-based and ideological accounts of prejudice, most notably Bob Altemeyer’s Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) theory and Felicia Pratto and Jim Sidanius’s Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) theory. Authoritarianism posits three broad attitudinal clusters: authoritarian submission (unquestioning deference to established authorities), authoritarian aggression (hostility toward individuals perceived as deviating from conventional norms), and conventionalism (rigid adherence to traditional social customs). Under this theoretical lens, homosexism functions as a primary mechanism of conventionalism and authoritarian aggression, wherein homosexual individuals are targeted because their sexual practices and identity formations explicitly contest conventional patriarchal, marital, and religious traditions.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the Homosexism Scale – Short form has been extensively substantiated across multiple empirical investigations involving college student cohorts, adult community samples, and cross-national populations.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Convergent validity is documented through robust, statistically significant correlations between the HS-SF and related psychological and sociopolitical constructs:

• Authoritarianism and Conservatism: Hansen (1982) and subsequent researchers established strong positive correlations between the HS-SF and measures of authoritarianism (typically ranging between r = .50 and r = .68, p < .001) as well as political conservatism. Individuals who score high on homosexism consistently display higher levels of dogmatism, intolerance of ambiguity, and rigid adherence to traditional social hierarchies.
• Religious Fundamentalism: Numerous studies have revealed moderate-to-strong positive associations between the HS-SF and intrinsic religiosity as well as religious fundamentalism (correlations frequently ranging from r = .45 to r = .62). Individuals subscribing to literalist interpretations of scriptural texts demonstrate significantly higher homosexism scores, driven by the theological condemnation dimension.
• Traditional Gender Role Ideology: The scale correlates significantly with measures of gender role traditionalism (e.g., the Attitudes Toward Women Scale; r values typically between .40 and .55), corroborating the theoretical premise that anti-gay attitudes are deeply intertwined with anxieties regarding the subversion of normative masculinity and femininity.
• Alternative Anti-Gay Attitude Scales: The HS-SF exhibits high convergent validity when cross-validated with other established scales, such as Herek’s Attitudes Toward Lesbians and Gay Men (ATLG) scale (r > .80) and Kite and Deaux’s Homosexuality Attitude Scale (HAS) (r > .75).

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity has been demonstrated by examining the relationship between the HS-SF and measures of general neuroticism, generalized clinical anxiety, and social desirability response biases. Research indicates that homosexism scores do not meaningfully correlate with non-ideological personality traits such as trait anxiety, somatic depression, or cognitive intelligence, demonstrating that the scale measures a specific sociopolitical attitude rather than generalized negative affectivity. Correlations with standard social desirability measures (e.g., the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale) typically fall in the negligible range (|r| < .15), indicating that responses are not heavily confounded by impression management in standard anonymous research administrations.

Predictive and Criterion-Related Validity

The HS-SF exhibits strong criterion and predictive validity in diverse behavioral and evaluative paradigms. In applied legal and victimological contexts, Davies (2002) and Davies et al. (2004) utilized the scale to predict attitudes toward male rape victims. Their findings demonstrated that participants exhibiting high HS-SF scores attributed significantly greater responsibility and blame to male victims of sexual assault, rated the trauma as less severe, and displayed diminished empathy toward the survivor, especially when the victim’s sexual orientation was perceived as non-heterosexual. Furthermore, in experimental intergroup settings, high HS-SF scores reliably predict physical seating distance chosen away from an openly gay confederate, refusal to sign petitions supporting LGBTQ+ anti-discrimination ordinances, and voting patterns in referenda regarding same-sex marriage and adoption bans.

8. Reliability

The Homosexism Scale – Short form demonstrates strong and stable reliability indices across diverse demographic groups and research contexts.

Internal Consistency

In Hansen’s (1982) initial scale construction, item-total correlations across the inventory were exceptionally robust, with all retained items demonstrating substantial discriminatory power. Subsequent psychometric evaluations of the 15-item short form consistently yield Cronbach’s alpha (α) coefficients between .88 and .94. For instance, in social psychological investigations assessing victim blame across university cohorts, internal consistency coefficients have routinely been documented at α = .90 to .93, indicating high item interrelatedness and minimal measurement error.

Split-Half Reliability

Evaluations of split-half reliability (utilizing Spearman-Brown prophecy formula corrections) have established coefficients consistently exceeding .85, further evidencing the operational homogeneity of the item pool regardless of whether the scale is divided into odd/even or matched-content sub-halves.

Test-Retest Reliability

Stability over time has been verified across test-retest intervals ranging from two to six weeks among non-intervention control cohorts. Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients over a four-week span have been documented in the range of r = .82 to .89 (p < .001). These findings confirm that the HS-SF captures an enduring ideological orientation rather than transient mood states or situationally primed affective reactions.

9. Factor Analysis

A critical focus in the psychometric assessment of the HS-SF has been the resolution of its underlying latent factor structure.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Initial Exploratory Factor Analyses conducted using principal axis factoring and principal components analysis with varimax and oblimin rotations typically reveal a robust, dominant single factor. In most analyses, the first unrotated factor accounts for approximately 45% to 55% of the total variance, with an eigenvalue well above Kaiser’s criterion (λ > 6.0). All 15 items exhibit primary factor loadings exceeding .40 on this overarching general factor, with the majority of items loading between .55 and .82.

When multiple factors are extracted (based on scree plot examination and parallel analysis), the data occasionally yield a correlated three-factor solution:

• Factor 1: Socio-Institutional Rights and Legal Equity (e.g., items concerning employment discrimination, holding high government offices, leadership roles, and the illegality of homosexual acts).
• Factor 2: Interpersonal Avoidance and Social Distance (e.g., items assessing willingness to work with, live next to, or maintain a friendship with a homosexual individual).
• Factor 3: Moral Condemnation and Threat Perception (e.g., items identifying male/female homosexuality as a sin and alleging danger or corruption to youth).

However, because the inter-factor correlations among these sub-dimensions are exceptionally high (typically r > .60 to .75), psychometricians uniformly agree that treating the scale as an essentially unidimensional composite score is both methodologically sound and conceptually parsimonious.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Confirmatory Factor Analytic investigations have confirmed the adequacy of the unidimensional model, particularly when error covariances between similarly worded reverse-scored items are accounted for. In structural equation modeling studies, a bi-factor model—featuring one general “Homosexism” dimension alongside two minor orthogonal method factors (representing positively keyed versus negatively keyed item method variance)—frequently yields excellent goodness-of-fit indices:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): ≥ .94 to .97
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): ≥ .93 to .96
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): ≤ .05 to .07 (with 90% confidence intervals spanning .04 to .08)
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): ≤ .04 to .06

These empirical fit indices demonstrate that the HS-SF accurately reflects a cohesive, unitary psychological construct with exceptional measurement integrity across structural modeling paradigms.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Name: Homosexism Scale – Short form (HS-SF)
• Alternative Titles: Scale of Prejudice Against Homosexuality, Hansen Homosexism Scale
• Developer: Gary L. Hansen (1982)
• Construct Measured: Homosexism (ideological prejudice, discriminatory attitudes, and social distance directed toward homosexual individuals)
• Instrument Format: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire, web-based survey, or structured computer-administered self-report
• Number of Items: 15 items
• Response Scale: 5-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly Disagree to 5 = Strongly Agree)
• Administration Time: Approximately 3 to 5 minutes
• Scoring Rules:
  • Items are rated on an integer scale from 1 to 5: 1 = Strongly Disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Undecided / Neutral, 4 = Agree, 5 = Strongly Agree.
  • Reverse Scored Items: Items 1, 2, 4, 9, 11, and 15 are positively worded toward homosexuals and must be reversed prior to calculating sum or mean scores. The transformation rule is: Reversed Score = 6 - Original Score (i.e., 5 becomes 1, 4 becomes 2, 3 remains 3, 2 becomes 4, and 1 becomes 5).
  • Directly Scored Items: Items 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, and 14 are keyed in the direction of prejudice and scored as marked (1 = 1 to 5 = 5).
  • Total Score Calculation: Sum all 15 item scores (after reversing the designated items). Possible total scores range from 15 to 75. Alternatively, a mean item score can be derived by dividing the sum by 15 (range: 1.00 to 5.00).
  • Interpretation: Higher aggregate scores indicate higher levels of homosexism, sexual prejudice, and support for the marginalization of homosexual individuals. Lower scores indicate egalitarian, accepting, and non-prejudiced attitudes.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Homosexism Scale was originally developed and published by Gary L. Hansen in 1982 in the academic journal The Journal of Social Psychology. As an instrument published in standard peer-reviewed scholarly literature for social-scientific research, it is widely considered part of the public academic domain for non-commercial educational, scientific, and dissertation research, provided appropriate formal attribution and bibliographic citation are given to the original author and journal.

There are no licensing fees, royalties, or mandatory purchase costs associated with utilizing the scale for non-commercial scholarly purposes. Commercial deployment, inclusion within commercial diagnostic batteries, or publication within fee-based software platforms typically requires written authorization from the copyright holder (the original author and/or the journal’s publisher, Taylor & Francis / Informa UK Limited). Researchers intending to adapt, translate, or modify items for specific demographic contexts should document any departures from the original validated text in their publications.

12. References

Allport, G. W. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Addison-Wesley.

Altemeyer, B. (1988). Enemies of freedom: Understanding right-wing authoritarianism. Jossey-Bass.

Bogardus, E. S. (1925). Measuring social distance. Journal of Applied Sociology, 9, 299–308.

Davies, M. (2002). Male sexual assault: A study of victim-blaming among university students. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 17(10), 1076–1089. https://doi.org/10.1177/088626002236659

Davies, M., Pollard, P., & Archer, J. (2004). Explaining negative rape victim perception: Homophobia and the male rape victim. Current Research in Social Psychology, 10(4), 48–60.

Hansen, G. L. (1982). Measuring prejudice against homosexuality (Homosexism) among college students: A new scale. The Journal of Social Psychology, 117(2), 233–236. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.1982.9713434

Herek, G. M. (1984). Beyond “homophobia”: A social psychological perspective on attitudes toward lesbians and gay men. Journal of Homosexuality, 10(1–2), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1300/J082v10n01_01

Herek, G. M. (1990). The context of anti-gay violence: Notes on cultural and psychological heterosexism. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 5(3), 316–333. https://doi.org/10.1177/088626090005003006

Herek, G. M. (2000). The psychology of sexual prejudice. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9(1), 19–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.00051

Kite, M. E., & Deaux, K. (1986). Attitudes toward homosexuality: Assessment and sex differences. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 10(2), 137–162. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6402.1986.tb00742.x

Weinberg, G. (1972). Society and the healthy homosexual. St. Martin’s Press.

13. Items of the Scale