The Impact of Professors’ Heterosexual Identity in Higher Education Classrooms

This proposed study is concerned with lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) student’s perceptions of classroom climate, and the potential negative impacts of these perceptions. A poor classroom climate can decrease student participation and contribute to minority stress, which can be a barrier to successful higher education. In this study, we plan to inspect the impact of professors’ heterosexual identities on their scores of Classroom Diversity Climate (CDC). We hope to recruit heterosexual Portland State University professors and their students for our study. After randomly assigning professors to either an intervention on integrative heterosexuality or to a waitlist (control) group, we will measure the professors’ integrative heterosexuality dimension and collect students’ ratings of CDC. We hypothesize that the intervention group will score higher on the measure of integrative heterosexuality than the control group, as well as that professors who receive the intervention will be rated higher on the CDC scale, as mediated by their scores on integrative heterosexual identity. We suspect our findings will have important implications for intergroup communication and for LGB student retention. Feedback Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfMnLIEQUZkPKtRsMGulJsHaohDeeIX5UFexvSRLkjSTRMDuQ/viewform?usp=sf_lin