Got Homophobia? Central Persuasion of Attitudes Towards Homosexuality in the Military
Poster Number
15
Format
Poster Presentation
Abstract/Artist Statement
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) was put into law in 1993 that forbade openly gay service men and women from serving in the United States military. Currently, there is a movement in the United States government to repeal the law that has been met with strong opposition from military personal and soldiers alike. While there is an abundant amount of research looking into attitudes towards gay men and women in a variety of contexts, no attitudinal scale has been developed to evaluate attitudes towards DADT, except ones developed by the military for internal use (Stotzer, 2009). The goal of the current study was two fold. First, a brief attitudinal measure was created to assess attitudes towards the DADT policy, which was concurrently validated against existing measures. Second, participants were randomly placed in one of three experimental conditions. The first experimental condition exposed participants to a video that expressed negative views towards the DADT law, while the second experimental condition exposed participants to a video that expressed positive views towards the DADT law. A third condition where no video was shown was used as a control group. After being exposed experimental condition or control, participants were asked to fill out the attitudinal measure created in part one of this study as well as other previously created attitudinal measure. The second part of the study sought to investigate any increase or decrease in total score on the measure that resulted from being exposed to one of the two experimental conditions when compared to the control group. It was hypothesized that participants who viewed the video with negative attitudes towards the law would have a higher total score than those who were exposed to the positive attitude video. For the measure used, a higher score on the DADT measure indicates that the participant is more in favor of repealing the current law.
Location
DeRosa University Center, Ballroom B
Start Date
1-5-2010 10:00 AM
End Date
1-5-2010 12:00 PM
Got Homophobia? Central Persuasion of Attitudes Towards Homosexuality in the Military
DeRosa University Center, Ballroom B
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) was put into law in 1993 that forbade openly gay service men and women from serving in the United States military. Currently, there is a movement in the United States government to repeal the law that has been met with strong opposition from military personal and soldiers alike. While there is an abundant amount of research looking into attitudes towards gay men and women in a variety of contexts, no attitudinal scale has been developed to evaluate attitudes towards DADT, except ones developed by the military for internal use (Stotzer, 2009). The goal of the current study was two fold. First, a brief attitudinal measure was created to assess attitudes towards the DADT policy, which was concurrently validated against existing measures. Second, participants were randomly placed in one of three experimental conditions. The first experimental condition exposed participants to a video that expressed negative views towards the DADT law, while the second experimental condition exposed participants to a video that expressed positive views towards the DADT law. A third condition where no video was shown was used as a control group. After being exposed experimental condition or control, participants were asked to fill out the attitudinal measure created in part one of this study as well as other previously created attitudinal measure. The second part of the study sought to investigate any increase or decrease in total score on the measure that resulted from being exposed to one of the two experimental conditions when compared to the control group. It was hypothesized that participants who viewed the video with negative attitudes towards the law would have a higher total score than those who were exposed to the positive attitude video. For the measure used, a higher score on the DADT measure indicates that the participant is more in favor of repealing the current law.