Loehr Annalise, Doan Long, Miller Lisa R
Department of Sociology, Indiana University, 744 Ballantine Hall, Bloomington, IN, 47405-3700, USA.
Arch Sex Behav. 2015 Nov;44(8):2111-23. doi: 10.1007/s10508-015-0483-7. Epub 2015 Feb 18.
Empirical research has documented that contact with lesbians and gays is associated with more positive feelings toward and greater support for legal rights for them, but we know less about whether these effects extend to informal aspects of same-sex relationships, such as reactions to public displays of affection. Furthermore, many studies have assumed that contact influences levels of sexual prejudice; however, the possibility of selection effects, in which less sexually prejudiced people have contact, and more sexually prejudiced people do not, raises some doubts about this assumption. We used original data from a nationally representative sample of heterosexuals to determine whether those reporting contact with a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender friend or relative exhibited less sexual prejudice toward lesbian and gay couples than those without contact. This study examined the effect of contact on attitudes toward formal rights and a relatively unexplored dimension, informal privileges. We estimated the effect of having contact using traditional (ordinary least squares regression) methods before accounting for selection effects using propensity score matching. After accounting for selection effects, we found no significant differences between the attitudes of those who had contact and those who did not, for either formal or informal measures. Thus, selection effects appeared to play a pivotal role in confounding the link between contact and sexual prejudice, and future studies should exercise caution in interpreting results that do not account for such selection effects.
实证研究表明，与女同性恋者和男同性恋者接触会使人对他们产生更积极的感受，并对他们的合法权利给予更多支持，但对于这些影响是否会延伸到同性关系的非正式方面，比如对公开示爱的反应，我们了解得较少。此外，许多研究都假定接触会影响性偏见的程度；然而，存在选择效应的可能性，即性偏见较低的人会有接触，而性偏见较高的人则不会，这对这一假设提出了一些质疑。我们使用了来自全国代表性异性恋样本的原始数据，以确定那些报告与女同性恋、男同性恋、双性恋或跨性别朋友或亲戚有接触的人，是否比没有接触的人对女同性恋和男同性恋伴侣表现出更少的性偏见。这项研究考察了接触对正式权利态度以及一个相对未被探索的维度——非正式特权的影响。在使用倾向得分匹配来考虑选择效应之前，我们用传统方法（普通最小二乘法回归）估计了接触的影响。在考虑选择效应之后，我们发现，无论是对于正式还是非正式的衡量标准，有接触者和无接触者的态度之间都没有显著差异。因此，选择效应似乎在混淆接触与性偏见之间的联系方面起到了关键作用，未来的研究在解释未考虑此类选择效应的结果时应谨慎行事。
