Homophobia Scale

Abstract

The Homophobia Scale (HS), constructed by Lester W. Wright, Jr., Henry E. Adams, and Jeffrey Bernat (1999), is a multidimensional psychometric instrument formulated to evaluate the cognitive, affective, and overt behavioral dimensions of homophobia. While conventional assessment tools within social psychology historically operationalized sexual prejudice predominantly as generalized ideological disapproval or attitudinal “homonegativity,” the HS was developed specifically to capture hostile behavioral inclinations, social avoidance, negative visceral affect, and overt aggressive acts toward gay and lesbian individuals. Comprising 25 self-report items administered on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (Strongly Agree) to 5 (Strongly Disagree), the instrument yields a continuous global homophobia index ranging from 0 to 100, alongside three empirically derived factor subscales: Behavior/Negative Affect (10 items), Affect/Behavioral Aggression (10 items), and Cognitive Negativism (5 items). Psychometric validation trials involving university cohorts demonstrated exceptional internal consistency (overall Cronbach’s α = .94) and robust temporal stability across a one-week retest interval (r = .96, p < .01). Factor analytic extraction accounted for 68.69% of the cumulative variance, with the primary behavioral and negative affective dimension explaining 40.88%. Criterion and concurrent validity were confirmed via moderate-to-strong correlations with Hudson and Ricketts’ (1980) Index of Homophobia (r = .66, p < .01), establishing that while the HS shares theoretical convergence with general homonegativity, its integration of overt hostility and behavioral avoidance distinguishes it as a clinically and forensically sensitive measure of anti-gay prejudice.

Keywords

Homophobia Scale, sexual prejudice, homonegativity, psychometrics, behavioral aggression, social avoidance, cognitive negativism, anti-gay violence, affective prejudice, scale validation

Authors

The Homophobia Scale was designed and validated by clinical and psychopathology researchers at the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia:

• Lester W. Wright, Jr., Ph.D. — Department of Psychology, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI (previously affiliated with the Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program at the University of Georgia). Primary investigator in behavioral assessment, sexual prejudice, and clinical psychopathology. (Correspondence: Department of Psychology, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI 49008; Email: [email protected]).
• Henry E. Adams, Ph.D. (1931–2000) — Department of Psychology, University of Georgia. Renowned clinical psychologist, psychopathology scholar, and pioneer in physiological arousal paradigms exploring the psychological and psychophysiological underpinnings of sexual orientation prejudice and defensiveness.
• Jeffrey A. Bernat, Ph.D. — Department of Psychology, University of Georgia. Clinical researcher specializing in sexual aggression, male hostility, and behavioral assessment of interpersonal prejudice.

Purpose

The primary impetus behind the engineering of the Homophobia Scale was to overcome a persistent methodological and conceptual limitation within the literature on sexual prejudice. During the late 1970s and 1980s, the predominant psychometric instruments—such as the Index of Homophobia (IHP; Hudson & Ricketts, 1980) or the Attitudes Toward Lesbians and Gay Men Scale (ATLG; Herek, 1988)—assessed homophobia largely as a unidimensional affective reaction or a set of moral, political, and religious beliefs. Sociologists and social psychologists frequently noted that such tools measured “homonegativity” (i.e., abstract institutional, moral, or political disapproval) rather than homophobia in its clinical and behavioral totality. True phobic and hostile patterns include physiological distress, interpersonal avoidance, verbal harassment, and physical violence.

Wright, Adams, and Bernat (1999) argued that an adequate measurement tool must embody the complete tripartite model of attitudes, capturing not only what individuals profess to believe regarding civil liberties or moral codes, but how they react emotionally and how they actively behave or intend to behave when confronted with homosexual individuals. The purpose of the HS is therefore threefold:

1. Tripartite Dimensional Assessment: To evaluate within a unified, 25-item metric the cognitive negativism, affective distress, and destructive behavioral manifestations (ranging from friendship termination to physical assault and property vandalism) directed against gay people.
2. Behavioral Prediction and Clinical Research: To facilitate experimental, social, and laboratory research investigating how high levels of homophobia translate into overt actions, physiological arousal (e.g., penile plethysmography, heart rate acceleration), and discriminatory decision-making.
3. Forensic and Educational Applications: To serve as a screening and outcome measure for diversity training programs, institutional climate evaluations, hate crime risk profiling, and anti-bias interventions across university, corporate, and forensic mental health environments.

Psychological Construct

The Homophobia Scale operationalizes sexual prejudice through three correlated yet structurally distinct psychological components:

1. Behavioral Avoidance and Negative Affect (Factor 1)

This primary construct captures both subjective visceral discomfort (e.g., “Gay people make me nervous”) and overt interpersonal avoidance or relational disruption. Rather than tapping abstract socio-political policy beliefs, Factor 1 evaluates how an individual responds when placed in real or anticipated proximity to gay persons. Items loading on this factor assess the inclination to terminate personal relationships upon learning an acquaintance’s sexual orientation (“If I discovered a friend was gay I would end the friendship”), discomfort with shared living arrangements (“I would feel comfortable having a gay roommate” [reverse scored]), and avoidance of public visibility (“It does not bother me to see two homosexual people together in public” [reverse scored]). This dimension reflects the foundational phobic response—dread, social withdrawal, and physical evasion driven by internal anxious or dysphoric affect.

2. Affect/Behavioral Aggression (Factor 2)

This dimension distinguishes the HS from nearly all contemporary attitudinal scales by capturing active hostility, derogatory communication, property destruction, and threat of physical violence. It measures the degree to which an individual externalizes anti-gay sentiment through antisocial or punitive actions. Indicators encompass verbal aggression (e.g., “I make derogatory remarks like ‘faggot’ or ‘queer’ to people I suspect are gay”; “I tease and make jokes about gay people”), behavioral harassment (“I have damaged property of gay persons, such as ‘keying’ their car”), and preemptive physical violence (“I would hit a homosexual for coming on to me”). Factor 2 provides a critical metric for assessing potential perpetrators of bias-motivated aggression and hate crimes.

3. Cognitive Negativism (Factor 3)

The third dimension evaluates the endorsement of hostile cognitive schemata, ideological beliefs, and political-institutional opposition to equality for gay and lesbian individuals. Items in this subscale measure institutionalized stereotyping, opposition to equal rights, and moral delegitimization, including resistance to civil equality (e.g., “Organizations which promote gay rights are necessary” [reverse scored]), marital opposition (“Marriage between homosexual individuals is acceptable” [reverse scored]), moral condemnation (“Homosexuality is acceptable to me” [reverse scored]), and the belief that homosexual behavior should be criminalized (“Homosexual behavior should not be against the law” [reverse scored]). Cognitive negativism provides the ideological substrate that often rationalizes the avoidance and aggression captured in Factors 1 and 2.

Theoretical Framework

The conceptual foundation of the Homophobia Scale rests upon classic attitudinal theory and clinical psychopathology models of phobic defensiveness. First formulated by clinical psychologist George Weinberg in 1972, the term homophobia was originally defined as a dread of being in close quarters with homosexual people, alongside irrational condemnation and contempt. However, as the field transitioned toward sociological frameworks, researchers like Gregory Herek (1988, 2004) proposed substituting “sexual prejudice” or “homonegativity,” pointing out that anti-gay sentiment rarely resembles a true DSM phobia involving incapacitating panic.

Wright, Adams, and Bernat (1999) argued that discarding the phobia paradigm entirely overlooked genuine clinical and behavioral phenomena. They integrated the tripartite model of attitudes (affect, behavior, and cognition; see Breckler, 1984; Eagly & Chaiken, 1993) with clinical paradigms of aggression and avoidance. In this tripartite schema:

• Affective processes comprise negative emotional states such as disgust, anxiety, anger, and discomfort experienced during real or imagined contact with gay men or lesbians.
• Cognitive processes reflect declarative knowledge structures, attributions, stereotypes, moral assessments, and legal beliefs regarding the legitimacy of non-heterosexual identities.
• Behavioral processes represent the behavioral expressions of the attitude, ranging from nonverbal distancing and social avoidance to verbal taunting, institutional discrimination, property damage, and overt physical violence.

Moreover, the framework is deeply rooted in the clinical research program pioneered by Henry E. Adams and colleagues (Adams, Wright, & Lohr, 1996), which demonstrated using penile plethysmography that men categorized as homophobic frequently exhibited paradoxical physiological sexual arousal to homoerotic stimuli, accompanied by pronounced defensive anxiety and cognitive denial. According to this psychoanalytically informed, behavioral-defense formulation, overt hostility and aggression (Factor 2) and social avoidance (Factor 1) may serve as anxiety-reduction mechanisms that protect defensive individuals from distressing internal conflicts or repressed impulses. By capturing both behavioral aggression and affective avoidance, the HS enables researchers to bridge cognitive-attitudinal paradigms with clinical and psychophysiological defense models.

Validity

Empirical validation of the Homophobia Scale was performed across systematic field trials to establish construct, concurrent, and discriminant validity:

Concurrent Validity

Concurrent validity was examined by administering the HS alongside the 25-item Index of Homophobia (IHP; Hudson & Ricketts, 1980), which was the established benchmark for assessing homophobia. Pearson product-moment correlation analysis between the total scores of the HS and the IHP yielded a statistically significant correlation of r = .66 (p < .01). This moderately strong correlation confirmed two critical psychometric properties:

• Convergent Validity: The HS captures substantial shared variance with established measures of anti-gay sentiment, verifying that it evaluates the core construct of sexual prejudice.
• Construct Uniqueness: Because the shared variance was approximately 43.6% (R² = .436), more than half of the variance in HS scores remained unshared with the IHP. This divergence reflects the HS’s deliberate inclusion of behavioral avoidance, derogatory slurs, property vandalism, and violent behavioral intentions, which are largely omitted from the purely attitudinal items of the IHP.

Construct and Criterion Validity

Construct validity is substantiated by significant group differences across biological sex. In the validation cohort of 145 university students, male participants exhibited significantly higher homophobia scores (M = 41.38, SD = 19.32, n = 47) than female participants (M = 27.56, SD = 18.44, n = 98). This substantial gender divergence (difference > 13.8 scale points) strongly mirrors empirical findings across the sexual prejudice literature, wherein heterosexual males consistently demonstrate elevated levels of hostility, social anxiety, and aggressive defense mechanisms toward homosexual individuals compared to heterosexual females.

Furthermore, subsequent experimental and behavioral studies using the HS have confirmed its predictive validity regarding laboratory-induced aggression, psychophysiological stress responses during interpersonal interactions with gay confederates, and differential willingness to interact with gay peers in cooperative tasks (Bernat, Calhoun, Adams, & Zeichner, 2001).

Reliability

The Homophobia Scale exhibits outstanding internal consistency and temporal stability:

• Internal Consistency: In the initial field trial (N = 321 midwestern university students; mean age = 22.38, SD = 4.12), the complete 25-item scale demonstrated an overall Cronbach’s alpha of α = .94 (p < .01). This indicates high item homogeneity and minimal measurement error across the entire composite instrument.
• Subscale Consistency: Individual subscales also exhibited strong internal consistency, with Factor 1 (Behavior/Negative Affect; α ≈ .91) and Factor 2 (Affect/Behavioral Aggression; α ≈ .89) displaying robust internal reliability despite assessing sensitive and socially undesirable behaviors.
• Test-Retest Stability: A subset of participants (N = 122) completed the instrument across a one-week test-retest interval. The resulting stability coefficient was r = .96 (p < .01), demonstrating exceptional temporal reliability and stability of the underlying construct across short retest periods in non-clinical samples.
• Standard Error of Measurement: Given an overall standard deviation of approximately 19.76 and a reliability coefficient of .94, the scale demonstrates a low Standard Error of Measurement (SEM ≈ 4.84 points), confirming that individual scores can be interpreted with high psychometric confidence.

Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the Homophobia Scale was determined through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) on the initial sample of 321 respondents. Principal axis factoring with orthogonal (Varimax) rotation yielded a definitive three-factor solution that accounted for 68.69% of the total scale variance.

Factor Extraction and Variance Breakdown

• Factor 1: Behavior/Negative Affect
  • Variance Explained: 40.88% of total variance.
  • Composition: 10 items (Items 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, and 22).
  • Subscale Score: Range 0 to 40; Mean = 10.79, SD = 8.22.
  • Description: Captures visceral anxiety, interpersonal avoidance, friendship termination, and aversion to public visibility of gay individuals.
• Factor 2: Affect/Behavioral Aggression
  • Variance Explained: 23.05% of total variance.
  • Composition: 10 items (Items 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 24, and 25).
  • Subscale Score: Range 0 to 40; Mean = 14.28, SD = 12.51.
  • Description: Reflects overt hostility, verbal teasing, property vandalism, fear of advances, and self-reported readiness to enact physical assault.
• Factor 3: Cognitive Negativism
  • Variance Explained: 4.77% of total variance.
  • Composition: 5 items (Items 3, 8, 16, 18, and 20).
  • Subscale Score: Range 0 to 20; Mean = 7.10, SD = 4.84.
  • Description: Assesses institutionalized stereotyping, opposition to civil rights organizations, marriage equality rejection, and support for criminalization.

Each of the 25 items demonstrated substantial factor loadings (> .40) onto its designated primary factor without disruptive cross-loadings, establishing distinct yet complementary constructs within the broader domain of sexual prejudice.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Homophobia Scale (HS)
• Developers: Lester W. Wright, Jr., Henry E. Adams, and Jeffrey Bernat (University of Georgia)
• Construct Assessed: Multidimensional sexual prejudice against gay and lesbian individuals (Affective, Behavioral, and Cognitive dimensions)
• Item Count: 25 items
• Administration Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or computer-assisted questionnaire
• Estimated Completion Time: 5 to 7 minutes
• Target Population: Adults and adolescents aged 18 and older in research, educational, or clinical contexts
• Response Anchors (5-Point Likert Scale):
  • 1 = Strongly Agree
  • 2 = Agree
  • 3 = Neither Agree nor Disagree
  • 4 = Disagree
  • 5 = Strongly Disagree
• Reverse Scoring Rules:
  • Sixteen (16) items are reverse scored prior to summing: Items 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 24, and 25.
  • Recoding transformation: 1 → 5, 2 → 4, 3 → 3, 4 → 2, 5 → 1.
  • Items 3, 7, 8, 10, 11, 16, 18, 20, and 22 maintain their raw numerical score.
• Scoring and Index Computation:
  • Total HS Score: Sum all 25 recoded/raw items and subtract 25: Total = ∑(Items 1–25) − 25. Possible range: 0 to 100 (0 = least homophobic, 100 = most homophobic).
  • Factor 1 (Behavior/Negative Affect): Sum recoded/raw items 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, and 22, then subtract 10: Factor 1 = ∑(1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 22) − 10. Possible range: 0 to 40.
  • Factor 2 (Affect/Behavioral Aggression): Sum recoded/raw items 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 24, and 25, then subtract 10: Factor 2 = ∑(12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25) − 10. Possible range: 0 to 40.
  • Factor 3 (Cognitive Negativism): Sum recoded/raw items 3, 8, 16, 18, and 20, then subtract 5: Factor 3 = ∑(3, 8, 16, 18, 20) − 5. Possible range: 0 to 20.
• Normative Reference Values: In the validation sample (N = 145), the overall mean score was 32.04 (SD = 19.76). Males: M = 41.38 (SD = 19.32); Females: M = 27.56 (SD = 18.44). Factor 1 M = 10.79 (SD = 8.22); Factor 2 M = 14.28 (SD = 12.51); Factor 3 M = 7.10 (SD = 4.84). The authors recommend computing sample-specific tertiles or standard deviation cutoffs to establish high and low categorization.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Homophobia Scale was officially published in 1999 in the Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment (Volume 21, Issue 4, pp. 337–347). The instrument was placed in the public scientific domain for educational, empirical, and academic research purposes. The scale authors stipulated that a copy of the measurement tool can be obtained at no cost for empirical investigation, with appropriate formal citation requested on all publications and presentations derived from its use.

Correspondence regarding the instrument, permission queries, or clinical adaptations should be addressed to:

Lester W. Wright, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of Psychology, Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo, MI 49008
Email: [email protected]

References

• Adams, H. E., Wright, L. W., Jr., & Lohr, B. A. (1996). Is homophobia associated with homosexual arousal? Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 105(3), 440–445. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843X.105.3.440
• Bernat, J. A., Calhoun, K. S., Adams, H. E., & Zeichner, A. (2001). Homophobia and physical aggression in heterosexual college males. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 110(3), 415–423. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843X.110.3.415
• Breckler, S. J. (1984). Empirical validation of affect, behavior, and cognition as distinct components of attitude. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47(6), 1191–1205. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.47.6.1191
• Eagly, A. H., & Chaiken, S. (1993). The psychology of attitudes. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers.
• Herek, G. M. (1988). Heterosexuals’ attitudes toward lesbians and gay men: Correlates and gender differences. The Journal of Sex Research, 25(4), 451–477. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224498809551476
• Herek, G. M. (2004). Beyond “homophobia”: Thinking about sexual prejudice and stigma in the twenty-first century. Sexuality Research & Social Policy, 1(2), 6–24. https://doi.org/10.1525/srsp.2004.1.2.6
• Hudson, W. W., & Ricketts, W. A. (1980). A strategy for the measurement of homophobia. Journal of Homosexuality, 5(4), 357–372. https://doi.org/10.1300/J082v05n04_02
• Weinberg, G. (1972). Society and the healthy homosexual. St. Martin’s Press.
• Wright, L. W., Jr., Adams, H. E., & Bernat, J. (1999). Development and validation of the Homophobia Scale. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 21(4), 337–347. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022174503741

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)