title: Assessing Politicized Sexual Orientation Identity: Validating the Queer Consciousness Scale.
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.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , Smith College , Northampton , Massachusetts , USA.
authors.forename: Lauren E
authors.initials: LE
authors.lastname: Duncan
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , Smith College , Northampton , Massachusetts , USA.
authors.forename: Elizabeth
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Mincer
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , Smith College , Northampton , Massachusetts , USA.
authors.forename: Sarah R
authors.initials: SR
authors.lastname: Dunn
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003243:Consciousness; D005260:Female; D005783:Gender Identity; D006806:Human Rights; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010556:Personality Tests; D011057:Politics; D011582:Psychological Theory; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012725:Sexual Behavior / Q000523:psychology*; D000072339:Sexual and Gender Minorities; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Activism; LGBTQ; ally; gay rights; group consciousness; personal political salience; political consciousness; politicized collective identity; queer; sexual orientation