Gender Role Ideology, Ambivalent Sexism, and Homonegativity as Predictors of Individuals’ Attitudes Toward Stalking and Its Victims

ABSTRACT

Stalking is a public health concern that affects both heterosexual and non-heterosexual individuals. Consequences to victims include being blamed for their stalking victimization and having their victimization minimized by others. However, less research has been conducted regarding attitudes toward non-heterosexual stalking victims and the fear individuals feel for stalking victims in general. Therefore, using a scenario-based approach, we examined how participants blamed stalking victims, minimized stalking incidents, and felt subjective fear for heterosexual and non-heterosexual stalking victims in hypothetical scenarios. Participants were recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk for two separate research studies. In Study 1, participants read about heterosexual stalking situations, and in Study 2, participants read about same-gender stalking situations. Participants responded to dependent variable questionnaires that assessed blame, minimization, and subjective fear. Participants also responded to predictor variables questionnaires that assessed gender role ideology, ambivalent sexism, attitudes toward lesbian women, and attitudes toward gay men. MANOVAs and simultaneous multiple regression analyses were conducted to analyze the hypotheses. There were no main effects of participant gender or hypothetical scenarios for either of the two research studies regarding blame, minimization, or subjective fear. However, gender role ideology, ambivalent sexism, and homonegativity were significant predictors of participants’ attitudes toward stalking. Explanation for the current studies’ findings and implications of these findings were discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Blame
• gender
• minimization
• sexual orientation
• stalking
• subjective fear

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The participants who participated in these two studies did not consent to sharing their data on an online, data-sharing platform. As such, we are unable to share the two datasets with other researchers or on an online, data-sharing platform for confidentiality reasons. We regret any inconvenience(s) this may cause.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Experiential Learning Fund Grant from the Department of Psychology at Brigham Young University-Provo. There is no grant number associated with this funding.