Abstract
The present thesis aims to understand the global decrease of homophobia over the last few decades. In Chapter 1, I summarise previous research on homophobia, especially in the context of Romania and the UK. The next two chapters focus on psychological interventions to reduce homophobia. A systematic review and set of meta-analyses in Chapter 2 found that education and contact with LGB people were effective interventions. The same review found that most research was conducted with American college students, and that some high-quality research performed by postgraduates was left unpublished. In Chapter 3, a systematic qualitative review found that these interventions were often described by participants as ‘eye-opening’, but were sometimes criticised as ‘out of context’. In the following chapter (Chapter 4), I looked at the change in homophobia on a societal level. Reanalysing data from a large scale international survey, I found that the same model could explain homophobia in the US, the UK and Romania, but the decrease of homophobia over a 20-year period remained unexplained. In the next two chapters, I turned from the causes to the consequences of the decrease in homophobia, asking whether the acceptance of LGB people may have negative implications for ethnic prejudice. In Chapter 5, I performed discourse analysis on media reports of a gay pride parade in Romania, finding that LGB people were excluded from constructions of Romanian national identity. In Chapter 6, I proposed a questionnaire and an experimental task to study sexualised nationalism, a set of ideologies that either include or exclude LGB people from national identities. I found that more acceptance of LGB people in Romania and the UK was not linked to exclusion of ethnic minorities. In the conclusion (Chapter 7), I propose that reducing homophobia can be achieved within a plurality of theoretical and practical frameworks.