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Heterosexual University Students’ Attitudes Toward Same-Sex Couples and Parents Across Seven European Countries

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A Correction to this article was published on 25 November 2021

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Abstract

Introduction

This research examined the general attitudes toward lesbian women and gay men (LG people), same-sex marriage (SSM), and LG parenting (LGP) in a large sample of young heterosexual European adults. We expected that one’s country of origin, gender role traditionalism, contact, and religiosity would predict their responses.

Methods

We conducted a large-scale study from April 2012 to November 2014. The sample consisted of 13,403 self-identified heterosexual students from Belgium, Italy, France, Portugal, Poland, Spain, and Greece (38.7% men and 61.2% women). The main research variables were general attitudes toward LG people, support for same-sex coupling and parenting, gender role traditionalism beliefs, frequency and quality of the contact with LG people, and religiosity.

Results

We found that the attitudes toward these issues were significantly more negative in Poland and Greece than in the other countries included in the sample. In addition, these national differences were explained by psychological variables, mainly religiosity and general attitudes toward LG people. Although participants’ higher satisfaction levels regarding their contact with LG people and lower levels of gender role traditionalism were associated with positive attitudes toward SSM and parenting, these factors did not account for the attitudinal variability between these countries.

Conclusions

Attitudes toward LG people are changing throughout Europe and are influenced by each country’s sociopolitical context. We highlight the societal importance of attitudes toward SSM and LG parenting and recommend facilitating positive social contact in universities and other settings to improve young adult heterosexuals’ attitudes.

Policy Implications

This study’s results can inform policies aiming to reduce inequality and develop more inclusive policies on same-sex parented families and couples.

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Notes

  1. A mediation means that the effect of a predictor on an outcome (dependent variable) is explained either in whole or in part (partial mediation) by a third variable (see Baron & Kenny, 1986) called the mediator.

  2. The main analyses were conducted with this aggregated contact score. The same analyses were run using the three contact categories in place of the aggregated indicators. The results of these analyses were similar to those of the former.

  3. Gender role traditionalism: items 5, 7, 9, and 12 from the original scale. Attitude toward LG people: item 5 (see online supplementary material).

  4. Because many participants seem to have no contact with LG people at all, we calculated alphas as a function of missing values (i.e., without the item “family”).

  5. We relied on the pairwise deletion of missing values for ANOVAs and correlations and on the listwise deletion of missing values for mixed models and structural equation modeling (for detailed information and differences between both approaches in our dataset, see online supplementary materials).

  6. Due to slight differences in the age and gender composition of the samples, we reproduced these analyses using ANCOVAs with gender and age as covariates. This had no bearing on the results.

  7. We did not enter contextual level 2 variables (e.g., mean of each predictor within a country: cf. Enders and Tofighi, 2007) because of the insufficient number of level 2 observations (seven countries). The purpose of the analysis, therefore, is to not examine the difference between countries but the effect of each predictor, taking into account between-country differences.

  8. Data of these studies were collected between 2012 and 2014 in the framework of the present European Research on Attitudes toward Same-Sex Marriage and LG parenting coordinated by the first and the third author.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all national researchers that participated in this study: Martine Gross and Emmanuel Gratton (France), Salvatore Ioverno and Vittorio Lingiardi (Italy), and Marta Dora (Poland).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Psychological Sciences and Education, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Avenue F.D. Roosevelt 50 - CP 122, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Salvatore D’Amore, Robin Wollast & Olivier Klein

  2. California School of Professional Psychology, Alliant International University, 1 Beach Street, Suite 100, San Francisco, CA, 94133-1221, USA

    Robert-Jay Green

  3. Équipe PErSEUS (EA 7312), UFR Sciences Humaines et Sociales, Université de Lorraine, Nancy, France

    Pierre Bouchat

  4. Instituto Universitario Ciencias Psicologicas, Sociais e da Vida-ISPA, Rua Jardim do Tabaco n°34, 1149-041, Lisbon, Portugal

    Pedro Alexandre Costa

  5. Sexual and Gender Minority Health Equity Lab, University of California, San Francisco, USA

    Katie Katuzny

  6. Faculty of Psychology, University of Liège, Quartier Agora, Place des Orateurs, 2 (Bât B32), 4000, Liège, Belgium

    Thérèse Scali

  7. Faculty of Medicine and Psychology, University La Sapienza, Piano IV, stanza 408, Via dei Marsi 78, 00185, Rome, Italy

    Roberto Baiocco

  8. Faculty of Psychology, Université Paris Nanterre, UFR SPSE, Bureau C402200 , Av. de la République, 200, 92001, Nanterre Cedex, France

    Olivier Vecho

  9. Department of Environmental Health, Jagiellonian University Medical College, Grzegorzecka 20 31-531, Krakow, Poland

    Magdalena Ewa Mijas

  10. Faculty of Psychology, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Campus de Somosaguas, s/n, 28223, Madrid, Spain

    Marta Evelia Aparicio

  11. New York College Athens, Leoforos Vasilis Amalias, 38, 10558, Athens, Greece

    Klio Geroulanou

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  1. Salvatore D’Amore
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Correspondence to Salvatore D’Amore.

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D’Amore, S., Wollast, R., Green, RJ. et al. Heterosexual University Students’ Attitudes Toward Same-Sex Couples and Parents Across Seven European Countries. Sex Res Soc Policy 19, 791–804 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-020-00511-4

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