Development for the Scale of Cognition and Attitudes toward Gay Men among medical students

Objective To develop the scale of cognition and attitudes towards gay men and to assess its validity and reliability,so as to provide an effective measuring instrument among the public.Methods Based on reviewing literatures and consulting specialists,an initial scale of cognition and attitudes towards gay men was developed.Subsequently,items were chosen from the pooled items by combination of screening strategies,which were tested on the 310 medical students sampled by randomized cluster.After the scale was made,765 medical students including both undergraduates and graduates from 3 medical colleges in Tianjin,sampled by using stratified cluster sampling,were asked to test the validity and reliability of the scale.Results The split-half coefficient and Cronbach α coefficient were 0.74,0.86 for cognitive subscale and 0.82,0.96 for attitudes subscale,respectively.By using principal components analysis,3 factors named the cognition of nature of gay men(8 items),the cognition of sexual behavior of gay men(3 items) and the cognition of living of gay men(4 items) were extracted with 51% of total cumulative variance explained in the cognitive subscale,while 4 factors named tolerance(13 items),rights(4 items),moral identity(5 items),social contact(3 items) were extracted with 68.4% of total cumulative variance explained in the attitudes subscale.Moreover,the criterion validity of the attitudes subscale was 0.86 referring to the Attitudes toward Gay Men Subscales(ATG).Conclusion The self-designed scale of cognition and attitudes towards gay men is proved to be practical and has good validity and reliability.