The effects of education on homophobic attitudes in college students

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether attitudes towards homosexuals could be modified by education from a biological or moral/religious perspective. Sixty-eight male and fifty-seven female volunteers from a mid-sized Catholic liberal arts university were randomly assigned to two groups. The first group viewed a video discussing homosexuality from a biological perspective. The second group viewed a video discussing homosexuality from a moral/religious perspective. The subject\u27s attitudes towards homosexuality were measured with a modified version of Smith\u27s Homophobic Scale (Lumby, 1976) immediately after viewing the video. A two-way (video x gender) ANOVA revealed significant main effects of video for three items on the questionnaire. Subjects viewing the biological video were less likely to be homophobic than subjects viewing the moral religious video on one of the questions. Significant main effects for gender revealed that males were more likely than females to be homophobic on most of the items