Allyship Scale

Abstract

The Allyship Scale (Chen, Joel, & Castro Lingl, 2023) is an 11-item psychometric instrument developed to evaluate lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals’ perceptions and evaluations of heterosexual and cisgender (straight) allyship. Rather than relying on majority-group self-appraisals of allyship—which often suffer from social desirability bias and divergent perceptions of efficacy—the Allyship Scale grounds its operationalization entirely in the lived experiences, bottom-up themes, and social perceptions of sexual and gender minority populations. Structurally, the instrument assesses three core correlated dimensions: Being Non-Prejudiced (4 items), Taking Action (4 items), and Having Humility (3 items). Responses are captured using a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“not at all important”) to 7 (“extremely important”), or adapted to rate target-specific behaviors on interpersonal effectiveness.

Psychometric evaluation across multiple community samples possessing nationally representative demographic features in the United States demonstrated exceptional measurement properties. Exploratory factor analysis revealed a clear three-factor structure accounting for 79.43% of the total cumulative variance, with the primary factor explaining 52.51%. Confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated excellent model fit across distinct relational target contexts, including close friends (Root Mean Square Error of Approximation [RMSEA] = .07, Comparative Fit Index [CFI] = .97, Standardized Root Mean Square Residual [SRMR] = .05), family members (RMSEA = .09, CFI = .96, SRMR = .06), and workplace coworkers (RMSEA = .06, CFI = .98, SRMR = .04). The scale demonstrates strong measurement invariance across target domains, outstanding internal consistency (McDonald’s omega ω = .92 for target ratings), robust convergent validity with global measures of perceived allyship, and distinct discriminant validity against general interpersonal traits. The Allyship Scale constitutes a methodologically rigorous framework for organizational diversity, interpersonal relationship research, and social justice psychometrics.

Keywords

Allyship Scale, Straight Allyship, LGBT Community, Being Non-Prejudiced, Taking Action, Cultural Humility, Intergroup Relations, Prosocial Advocacy, Psychometrics, Measurement Invariance

Authors

The Allyship Scale was developed and validated by an interdisciplinary team of researchers specializing in social psychology, interpersonal relationships, and intergroup dynamics:

• Jacqueline M. Chen, Ph.D. — Department of Psychology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. ORCID: 0000-0001-9347-3816. Email: [email protected]. Correspondence address: 380 South 1530 East, BEHS 502, Salt Lake City, UT 84112.
• Samantha Joel, Ph.D. — Department of Psychology, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada.
• Daphne Castro Lingl, B.A. — Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, United States.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Allyship Scale is to measure, systematically and quantitatively, how LGBT individuals perceive and evaluate the behaviors, attitudes, and interpersonal orientations of straight allies. Historically, the academic study of allyship suffered from a significant methodological asymmetry: instruments almost exclusively captured majority-group individuals’ self-reported beliefs about their own advocacy or anti-racist/anti-homophobic orientations. Such majority-centric scales inherently introduce susceptibility to ego-defensive biases, social desirability, and the “performative allyship” paradox, wherein dominant-group actors proclaim dedication to civil rights without engaging in behaviors that the marginalized targets themselves perceive as supportive, meaningful, or low in self-aggrandizement.

The Allyship Scale reverses this perspective by prioritizing the minority target’s perspective. Designed via bottom-up qualitative elicitation of themes from self-identified LGBT community members, the scale operationalizes allyship not as an immutable internal identity claimed by an individual, but as an ongoing relational process judged by those whom the ally seeks to support. Consequently, the instrument serves both theoretical and applied scientific functions across diverse institutional settings:

• Applied Organizational Psychology: Human resource professionals and organizational researchers utilize the instrument to evaluate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training programs, assessing whether corporate straight allies exhibit actionable support that queer employees recognize as authentic rather than cosmetic.
• Close Relationship Research: The scale enables psychologists to evaluate how perceived allyship functions within personal networks—including family systems, long-term friendships, and peer groups—clarifying how social support buffers against minority stress and psychological distress.
• Intergroup Conflict and Coalition Building: The tool offers social psychologists empirical indicators of the behavioral antecedents that cultivate trust, social solidarity, and cross-orientation coalitions between dominant and marginalized social groups.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the Allyship Scale is perceived straight allyship, conceptualized as a multi-component evaluation held by sexual and gender minority individuals regarding the prosocial, nonprejudiced, and humble behaviors displayed by heterosexual/cisgender peers. Rather than treating allyship as a unidimensional orientation, Chen and colleagues (2023) established that LGBT targets evaluate potential allies across three interdependent psychological dimensions:

1. Being Non-Prejudiced

The foundational component of perceived allyship is the possession of egalitarian values and the absence of interpersonal prejudice. Being non-prejudiced entails foundational cognitive attitudes such as wanting equal rights for all human beings, actively caring that people are treated fairly across social domains, maintaining an open-minded and non-judgmental stance, and demonstrating authentic acceptance of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities. Within intergroup relations theory, this dimension reflects the core prerequisite of baseline safety: sexual minorities must first perceive that a majority group member rejects systemic homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia before any proactive behavioral interventions can be experienced as trustworthy.

2. Taking Action

The second dimension addresses the public and behavioral manifestation of allyship. It moves beyond passive egalitarianism into visible intervention, advocacy, and education. Operationalized behaviors include vocal support for the LGBT+ community, directly challenging anti-LGBT discrimination in interpersonal or public settings, actively fighting for social and structural equality, and independently seeking out educational opportunities to deepen knowledge regarding queer history, policy issues, and lived experiences. For LGBT individuals, non-prejudiced attitudes that remain unvoiced provide limited institutional protection; thus, Taking Action signifies a willingness on the part of straight individuals to spend their own social capital and absorb social risks to advance minority welfare.

3. Having Humility

The third, and often most nuanced, dimension of allyship is relational and cultural humility. Identified consistently in qualitative reports from marginalized populations, humility involves deliberate self-regulation by dominant-group members during intergroup discourse. Behaviors defining this construct include listening more than speaking when LGBT topics are discussed, intentionally keeping the spotlight off oneself, and avoiding the co-optation of group conversations by subordinating minority experiences to one’s own opinions or tangential personal anecdotes. This dimension explicitly captures minority concerns regarding “virtue signaling” and self-aggrandizing behavior, ensuring that straight advocacy does not silence or marginalize the very voices it ostensibly seeks to empower.

Theoretical Framework

The Allyship Scale is grounded in modern social psychological frameworks of intergroup relations, social justice advocacy, and minority stress theory:

Intergroup Contact and Social Identity Theory

Drawing on Gordon Allport’s (1954) Contact Hypothesis and Tajfel and Turner’s (1979) Social Identity Theory, allyship represents an atypical intergroup dynamic where high-status group members proactively work against their own structural privileges to support low-status outgroup members. Traditional intergroup models often focus on dominant group members reducing explicit bias; however, Chen et al.’s framework recognizes that reducing overt prejudice does not automatically lead to effective cross-group solidarity. To bridge the psychological divide, members of the dominant group must be perceived by outgroup members as sharing common ingroup values while respecting outgroup autonomy and distinctiveness.

Minority Stress Theory

According to Ilan Meyer’s Minority Stress Theory (2003), LGBT individuals navigate persistent distal stressors (e.g., discrimination, interpersonal rejection) and proximal cognitive stressors (e.g., expectations of rejection, hypervigilance, identity concealment). Authentic perceived allyship functions as a vital environmental counterweight. When heterosexual peers exhibit consistent non-prejudice, courageous public action, and conversational humility, they foster local social climates characterized by psychological safety. This relational buffer attenuates the cognitive load associated with minority stress and reduces hypervigilant identity monitoring.

Cultural Humility and Decentered Advocacy

The theoretical incorporation of humility aligns with Tervalon and Murray-García’s (1998) model of cultural humility, which emphasizes continuous self-critique, acknowledgment of personal power imbalances, and the surrender of assumed cultural authority. In the context of allyship, cultural humility requires heterosexual individuals to abandon paternalistic “savior” orientations in favor of decentered, collaborative solidarity. The theoretical architecture of the Allyship Scale directly reflects this nuance, asserting that proactive intervention without interpersonal humility can alienate marginalized populations rather than empower them.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the Allyship Scale was established through a series of rigorous empirical evaluations across diverse target relationships and community samples (Chen, Joel, & Castro Lingl, 2023):

Content and Construct Validity

Content validity was secured through bottom-up inductive qualitative research. Instead of adapting items exclusively from existing academic frameworks designed by non-minority theorists, the researchers asked LGBT participants to describe specific actions, attitudes, and emotional experiences that characterized effective versus ineffective straight allies. The resulting thematic taxonomy formed the empirical basis for initial item generation, ensuring high ecological and semantic validity within the target population.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity was evaluated by assessing the correlation between the composite Allyship Scale and face-valid global measures of perceived allyship across multiple interpersonal relationship types. The overall allyship composite demonstrated robust, statistically significant positive correlations with direct single-item assessments of perceived allyship efficacy when participants rated close friends, extended family members, and workplace colleagues (all p < .001). Furthermore, target ratings on the subscales correlated positively with target warmth, trustworthiness, and feelings of interpersonal closeness.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established by comparing allyship ratings against broader intra- and interpersonal constructs. The scale was shown to be empirically distinct from generalized partner responsiveness, general prosociality, and generic trait agreeableness. While related to general kindness, the specific components of taking public action against anti-LGBT prejudice and demonstrating conversational humility in LGBT-focused contexts accounted for unique variance in LGBT individuals’ relational satisfaction and psychological safety, demonstrating that the construct of perceived allyship is not redundant with generic positive social interaction.

Reliability

The Allyship Scale exhibits high internal consistency reliability across its total composite score and individual subscales:

• Composite Reliability: In target-specific evaluations (such as evaluating a straight roommate, close friend, or colleague), McDonald’s omega (ω) reliability coefficients reached .92, demonstrating excellent internal consistency well above the standard scientific threshold of .80.
• Subscale Consistency: Individual subscales consistently yield high Cronbach’s alpha (α) and omega (ω) coefficients across multiple experimental and correlational studies, typically ranging between .84 and .91 for Being Non-Prejudiced, .86 and .93 for Taking Action, and .80 and .88 for Having Humility.
• Measurement Stability: The structural cohesion of the items remains uniform across different relational contexts, indicating that the scale items reliably tap into the same shared variance regardless of whether the evaluator is assessing an intimate peer, a relative, or a professional associate.

Factor Analysis

The latent structure of the Allyship Scale was identified through systematic exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses reported by Chen, Joel, and Castro Lingl (2023):

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Initial exploratory factor analysis was conducted on an early item pool to examine dimensionality. The analysis revealed that the first three factors cumulatively accounted for an impressive 79.43% of the total variance:

• Factor 1 (Being Non-Prejudiced): Initial eigenvalue of 6.82, accounting for 52.51% of the total variance.
• Factor 2 (Taking Action): Initial eigenvalue of 2.22, accounting for 17.08% of the total variance.
• Factor 3 (Having Humility): Initial eigenvalue of 1.28, accounting for 9.84% of the total variance.

Subsequent factors (factors 4, 5, and 6) each explained less than 4.5% of the variance and yielded eigenvalues below 0.60, confirming the mathematical parsimony and psychological elegance of the three-factor solution.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Following the initial EFA, two problematic items exhibiting cross-loadings or structural redundancy were removed, resulting in the refined 11-item instrument. Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed that the three-factor correlated model demonstrated acceptable to excellent goodness-of-fit across three independent relational targets:

• Rating a Friend: χ² model fit was corroborated with RMSEA = .07 (90% CI [.06, .09]), CFI = .97, and SRMR = .05.
• Rating a Family Member: RMSEA = .09 (90% CI [.08, .11]), CFI = .96, and SRMR = .06.
• Rating a Coworker: RMSEA = .06 (90% CI [.04, .08]), CFI = .98, and SRMR = .04.

Measurement Invariance

The researchers conducted multigroup measurement invariance testing across the target conditions (friend, family member, coworker). The testing supported strong (scalar) measurement invariance, demonstrating equivalent factor loadings and item intercepts across target relationships. This provides empirical justification for researchers to directly compare allyship ratings across distinct social roles and settings.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Psychometric rating inventory / Self-report questionnaire for sexual and gender minority respondents.
• Target Format: Can be administered as an ideal-prototype measure (rating the general importance of each behavior for an ally) or as a target-specific behavioral appraisal (rating the extent to which a specific individual performs these behaviors).
• Administration Method: Electronic survey (Qualtrics, REDCap, or web platform) or paper-and-pencil administration.
• Target Population: Human adults (≥ 18 years) who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBT+).
• Language: English (United States).
• Item Count: 11 items.
• Subscales (3):
  • Being Non-Prejudiced: Items 1, 2, 3, 4 (4 items)
  • Taking Action: Items 5, 6, 7, 8 (4 items)
  • Having Humility: Items 9, 10, 11 (3 items)
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“not at all important”) to 7 (“extremely important”) for normative expectation versions, or from 1 (“strongly disagree”) to 7 (“strongly agree”) when assessing a specific target’s demonstrated behavior.
• Scoring Procedures: Subscale scores are calculated by averaging the items corresponding to each dimension. An overall composite perceived allyship score is obtained by calculating the arithmetic mean across all 11 items. Higher scores denote greater perceived importance or higher perceived allyship quality. No items are reverse-scored.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Allyship Scale was published in 2023 by the American Psychological Association (APA). The instrument is freely accessible for non-commercial academic research, pedagogical purposes, and institutional scientific inquiry. Commercial utilization, integration into fee-for-service consulting models, or reproduction in commercial training manuals requires formal permissions from the copyright holder and corresponding authors. Inquiries regarding permissions and adaptations should be directed to Dr. Jacqueline M. Chen at the University of Utah ([email protected]).

References

• Allport, G. W. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Addison-Wesley.
• Chen, J. M., Joel, S., & Castro Lingl, D. (2023). Antecedents and consequences of LGBT individuals’ perceptions of straight allyship. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 125(4), 827–851. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000422
• Meyer, I. H. (2003). Prejudice, social stress, and mental health in lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations: Conceptual issues and research evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 129(5), 674–697. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.129.5.674
• Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33–47). Brooks/Cole.
• Tervalon, M., & Murray-García, J. (1998). Cultural humility versus cultural competence: A critical distinction in defining physician training outcomes in multicultural education. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, 9(2), 117–125. https://doi.org/10.1353/hpu.2010.0233

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)