Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2017
Publication Title
Journal of Homosexuality
Abstract
Building on psychological theories of motivation for collective action, we introduce a new individual difference measure of queer consciousness, defined as a politicized collective identity around sexual orientation. The Queer Consciousness Scale (QCS) consists of 12 items measuring five aspects of a politicized queer identity: sense of common fate, power discontent, system blame, collective orientation, and cognitive centrality. In four samples of adult women and men of varied sexual orientations, the QCS showed good test-retest and Cronbach’s reliability and excellent known-groups and predictive validity. Specifically, the QCS was positively correlated with identification as a member of the LGBTQ community, political liberalism, personal political salience, and LGBTQ activism and negatively correlated with right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. QCS mediated relationships between several individual difference variables and gay rights activism and can be used with both LGBTQ people and allies.
Keywords
group consciousness, LGBTQ, personal political salience, political consciousness, politicized collective identity, queer, sexual orientation
Volume
64
Issue
8
First Page
1069
Last Page
1091
DOI
10.1080/00918369.2016.1236599
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Rights
Licensed to Smith College and distributed CC-BY under the Smith College Faculty Open Access Policy
Recommended Citation
Duncan, Lauren E.; Mincer, Elizabeth; and Dunn, Sarah R., "Assessing Politicized Sexual Orientation Identity: Validating the Queer Consciousness Scale" (2017). Psychology: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/psy_facpubs/7
Comments
Peer reviewed accepted manuscript.