Peers and Homophobic Attitudes in Adolescence: Examining Selection and Influence Processes in Friendships and Antipathie
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EMPIRICAL RESEARCH
Peers and Homophobic Attitudes in Adolescence: Examining Selection and Influence Processes in Friendships and Antipathies Chaïm la Roi
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Jan Kornelis Dijkstra3 Tina Kretschmer4 Rūta Savickaitė3 René Veenstra3 ●
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Received: 4 May 2020 / Accepted: 18 July 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Homophobic attitudes and behavior are a widespread problem among adolescents, but what the role of peer relationships such as friendships and antipathies is in shaping these attitudes remains unclear. Therefore, this study examined to what extent homophobic attitudes are influenced by friends’ and foes’ homophobic attitudes, and whether homophobic attitudes serve as a selection criterion for the formation of friendships and antipathies. Participants came from three Dutch high schools across two waves (wave 1 November 2014, wave 2 March/April 2015, ages 11–20, N = 1935, 51.5% girls). Stochastic actor-oriented models were estimated for testing hypotheses. The results showed that adolescents adjusted their homophobic attitudes to their friends’ homophobic attitudes, but homophobic attitudes were not consistently related to friendship selection. Further, findings indicated that being dissimilar in homophobic attitudes increased the likelihood to dislike cross-sex peers. Together, the findings suggest that adolescents’ homophobic attitudes were to some extent subject to peer influence, but homophobic attitudes did not steer who adolescents befriended or disliked. Keywords models
Homophobic attitudes Peer influence Negative influence Attitude dynamics Stochastic actor-oriented ●
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Introduction Homophobic attitudes and behavior are a widespread problem among adolescents. Recent studies report that approximately half of all adolescents fall victim to homophobic name-calling over the course of adolescence, with same-sex attracted boys running a particularly high risk
Supplementary information The online version of this article (https:// doi.org/10.1007/s10964-020-01298-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Chaïm la Roi chaim.laroi@sofi.su.se 1
Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI), Stockholm University, Universitetsvägen 10F, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden
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Institute for Futures Studies, Holländargatan 13, 111 36 Stockholm, Sweden
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Department of Sociology, Interuniversity Center for Social Science Theory and Methodology (ICS), University of Groningen, Grote Rozenstraat 31, 9712 TG Groningen, The Netherlands
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Department of Pedagogy and Educational Science, University of Groningen, Grote Rozenstraat 38, 9712 TJ Groningen, The Netherlands
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(Collier et al. 2013). Being the target of homophobic behavior has detrimental effects on the mental health of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) (Aragon et al. 2014) as well as heterosexual adolescents (Slaatten et al. 2015). Because homophobic attitudes serve as an important prerequisite for the expression of homophobic behavior in adolescence (Poteat et al. 2013, 2015), a thorough understa
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