Severity and Influencing Factors of Homophobia in Korean Nursing Students

Hye Weon Kwak, Min Young Kim and Min Young Kim
Additional contact information
Hye Weon Kwak: Department of Nursing, Daekyeung University, Gyeongsan 38547, Korea
Min Young Kim: Department of Nursing, Ulsan University, Ulsan 44610, Korea
Min Young Kim: Department of Nursing, Daekyeung University, Gyeongsan 38547, Korea

IJERPH, 2019, vol. 16, issue 23, 1-8

Abstract: Sexual minorities are people with non-cis and non-heterosexual gender identities, including LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) identities. Korean society is prejudiced against sexual minorities—in our study, we will broadly label this prejudice homophobia. It is possible that sexual minorities do not receive appropriate health management owing to such prejudices. Therefore, it is necessary to reduce homophobia in nursing students. This study aims to measure the degree of homophobia in Korean nursing students and identify the factors that affect homophobia. Our study is a cross-sectional study, which surveys attitudes of 265 nursing students toward homophobia in five Korean cities in January to March, 2019. The average homophobia score was 74.5 out of a possible 120; 92.9% of the participants were classified as homophobic, and 42.3% as highly homophobic. We found that participants who were male, religious, had low self-esteem, and had no family members or acquaintances who might belong to a sexual minority group, were more likely to be homophobic. Nursing students in Korea still exhibit high levels of homophobia. As high levels of homophobia can negatively affect health management and nursing, especially in the case of sexual minorities, we suggest that educational programs should be set up to reduce homophobia in nursing students.

Keywords: homophobia; nursing students; factors; sexual minorities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/23/4692/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/23/4692/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:16:y:2019:i:23:p:4692-:d:290723

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().