We believed positive experiences with homosexual men and women would decrease participants’ negative attitudes toward gay men and lesbians. We found a moderately strong negative association (?=-.45, se = .07, p < .05) between quality of participants' interactions with gay and lesbian individuals and negative attitudes toward homosexual; thus, confirming our third hypothesis. A one unit increase in participants perceived positive experiences during their interactions with homosexual men and women decreased their sexual prejudice score by half a point. Moreover, we found significant correlations between positive experiences with gay men and lesbians and previous interactions with homosexual men and women (r = .26, se = .05, p < .05), as well as with participants' perceived similarities in their friends' attitudes toward gay men and lesbians (r = .24, se = .07, p < .05). While moderately low, the association between these three latent factors point to the multifaceted nature of participants' attitudes toward gay and lesbian people.
Our fourth hypothesis stated participants with stronger religious convictions would hold stronger negative attitudes toward gay men and lesbians. We found religiosity to be the strongest predictor of participants’ negative attitudes toward gay men and lesbians (?=.50, se = .11, p < .05). For every unit increase in participants' assessment of the importance of their religious beliefs in their lives, their sexual prejudice score increased by half a scale point.
Our very own findings suggest no differences in the fresh new model’s highway vary owed in order to participants’ sex
Given the non-tall anticipate regarding peers’ similarities inside their attitudes to your homosexuals, i tried deleting it road nevertheless the model is incapable of converge effectively once 500 iterations. Hence, we kept which reason for our very own design to make certain winning design stability. The final model presented an enthusiastic R 2 of 56% for sexual prejudice’s variance.
Research having sex consequences
In order to test whether the exploratory structural model provided an equally good fit for males and females, we re-ran the structural model estimation procedures running each group’s covariance matrix simultaneously. All factor loadings, paths, and variances were constrained to be equal in the initial model. The sex differences model indicated a relatively acceptable fit for both sexes, [? 2 (141, N-males nudistfriends = 153, N-females = 207) = ; NFI = .88, NNFI = .93, CFI = .94, RMSEA = .055]. We then freed each path consecutively to test whether sex differences existed between the significant latent-factors and sexual prejudice. After freeing the path for participants’ interaction with homosexuals and sexual prejudice, we found no difference across male and female participants (? ? 2 (1) = 1.27, n.s.). Subsequently, we freed the path between positive experiences with homosexuals and sexual prejudice but we found no difference by participants’ sex (? ? 2 (1) = .05, n.s.). Finally, we tested whether sex differences existed between religiosity and sexual prejudice but no difference was found (? ? 2 (1)= 0.27, n.s.).
Regardless of if our very own analyses find a great fit toward studies, i tested if or not other model could match the information just as well otherwise ideal (MacCallum, Wegener, Uchino, & Fabrigar, 1993). Theoretically, it is simply as possible that folks with deeper bad thinking towards homosexuality perform avoid getting together with gay people and you will lesbians, rating the connections because the bad, perceiving their friends as the that have additional perceptions to your homosexual people, otherwise find reassurance regarding their beliefs within their religiosity. Figure 2 gifts it inversed causation solution model below.
A choice exploratory structural design: Imagine if sexual prejudice forecasts correspondence and you may positive knowledge with homosexuals, observed resemblance with peers’ thinking towards homosexuality, and you can religiosity. All strong outlines show statistically significant paths on .05 height. Magnitudes regarding connection are given the standard mistakes within the parentheses; X 2 (61, Letter = 360) = . Normed (NFI), non-normed (NNFI), and you will relative (CFI) goodness-of-fit is .91, .91, .93, respectively; RMSEA was .09.