Attitude of Indian Youth towards Homosexuality

Abstract

Homosexualism is behaviour or a phenomenon in which individuals of the same sex are attracted to or have sexual relations with each other. In India, homosexuality is a taboo subject. Much research has not been conducted to understand the attitude of Indian youth towards homosexuality. The aim of the present research was to measure the implicit attitude, and a comparative analysis between the contact group (those who are in contact with homosexual individuals) and the non-contact group (those who neither know nor are in touch with homosexual individuals) was conducted. Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, McGhee, Schwartz, 1998) was used to gauge the implicit attitude towards homosexual individuals. 100 (50 males and 50 females) undergraduate and graduate students of Delhi and NCR were taken as sample in the study. It has been highlighted through various studies that people might show a positive or a neutral attitude towards homosexuality but unconsciously it may not always be the case. The contact hypothesis (Allport, 1954) suggests that the prejudice against homosexuals can be mitigated by encouraging interpersonal contact between non-homosexual and homosexual population. The findings of this study suggests that the contact group held a positive attitude towards homosexuals (30 out of 50), while the non-contact group held a negative one (40 out of 50).