Metadata record for National Survey of Sexual Health & Behavior: Bisexualities Indiana Attitudes Scale
100265
Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
ICPSR metadata records are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
V1
National Survey of Sexual Health & Behavior: Bisexualities Indiana Attitudes Scale
100265
http://doi.org/10.3886/E100265V1
Brian Dodge
Debby Herbenick
Tsung-Chieh (Jane) Fu
Please see full citation.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License.
Church & Dwight, Co., Inc.
Indiana University
Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
Dodge, Brian, Herbenick, Debby, and Fu, Tsung-Chieh (Jane). National Survey of Sexual Health & Behavior: Bisexualities Indiana Attitudes Scale. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2016-09-20. https://doi.org/10.3886/E100265V1
bisexual
attitudes
nationally representative sample
As bisexual individuals in the United States (U.S.) face
significant health disparities, researchers have posited that these differences
may be fueled, at least in part, by negative attitudes, prejudice, stigma, and
discrimination toward bisexual individuals from heterosexual and gay/lesbian
individuals. Previous studies of individual and social attitudes toward bisexual
men and women have been conducted almost exclusively with convenience samples,
with limited generalizability to the broader U.S. population. Our study
provides an assessment of attitudes toward bisexual men and women among a
nationally representative sample of heterosexual, gay, lesbian, and “other”-identified
adults in the U.S. Data were collected from the 2015 National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior (NSSHB), via an online questionnaire with a probability sample of adults
(18 and over) from throughout the U.S. We included two modified 5-item versions
of the Bisexualities: Indiana Attitudes Scale (BIAS), validated sub-scales
that were developed to measure attitudes toward bisexual men and women. Data were
analyzed using descriptive statistics, gamma regression, and paired t-tests. Gender,
sexual identity, age, race/ethnicity, income, and educational attainment were
all significantly associated with participants' attitudes toward bisexual
individuals. In terms of responses to individual scale items, participants were
most likely to “neither agree nor disagree” with attitudinal statements. Across
sexual identities, self-identified "other" participants reported the
most positive attitudes, while heterosexual male participants reported the
least positive attitudes. Overall, attitudes toward bisexual men were significantly
less positive than toward bisexual women across identities. As in previous research
on convenience samples, we found a wide range of demographic characteristics
were related with attitudes toward bisexual individuals in our nationally-representative
study of heterosexual, gay/lesbian, and "other"-identified adults in
the U.S. Additionally, as in previous studies, gender emerged as a significant
characteristic; female participants’ attitudes were more positive than male
participants’ attitudes, and all participants’ attitudes were generally more
positive toward bisexual women than bisexual men. While population data suggest
a marked shift in more positive attitudes toward gay men and lesbian women in
the general population of the U.S., the largest proportions of participants in
our study reported a relative lack of agreement or disagreement with the
affective-evaluative statements in the BIAS
scales.
Findings document the absence of positive attitudes toward bisexual
individuals among the general population of adults in the U.S. Our findings
highlight the need for developing intervention approaches to promote more
positive attitudes toward bisexual individuals, targeted toward not only heterosexual
and but also gay/lesbian individuals and communities.
United States