Author(s)

Shiqi Zhang¹, Shuohan Feng², Zhimin Shen³

¹Ashley Hall, Charleston, SC, USA.
²Nanjing Foreign Language School, Nanjing, China.
³Jining University, Qufu, China.

The topic of attitudes and prejudice toward gays and lesbians is rarely done on children due to its sensitive nature. However, it is important to understand how children form attitudes and prejudice toward this minority group, and whether their background could contribute to the formation of their opinions since children’s attitudes toward lesbians and gays could greatly influence their adult behaviors, such as discrimination. In this study, we looked at age, gender, religion, media exposure, parents’ attitudes and teachers’ attitudes as background factors influencing children’s attitudes toward gays and lesbians. We sampled from one elementary school in the United States. The total recruited participants are 100 children, with the age of 6 to 10 years old. Each of the five ages has sample size of n = 20 participants. The total number of male and female participants is 50 children each. We designed a series of questionnaires for children, their parents, and teachers to answer in order to fully assess the influence of each of the six background factors on children’s attitudes toward gays and lesbians. The result shows that age and media exposure has positive relationship with children’s levels of prejudice toward gays lesbians; religiosity, parents’ and teachers’ attitudes toward gays and lesbians have a positive relationship with children’s attitudes toward these two groups. Media exposures have more significant influences on children’s attitudes.

Gay, Lesbian, Developmental Psychology, Attitude, Background

Zhang, S. , Feng, S. and Shen, Z. (2019) How Do Background Factors Influence Children’s Attitudes toward Gays and Lesbians?. Psychology, 10, 1572-1594. doi: 10.4236/psych.2019.1012103.