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Criminology & Social Integration : journal for criminology, penology and behaviour problems, Vol. 23 No. 2, 2015.

Original scientific paper

Police College Students’ Attitudes toward Homosexual Persons

Irma Kovčo Vukadin orcid id orcid.org/0000-0003-2139-6748 ; Odsjek za kriminologiju, Edukacijsko-rehabilitacijski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu

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Abstract

According to the results of numerous studies, personal attitudes of professionals who are dealing with homosexual persons affect their eagerness and the quality of their work. Negative attitudes toward homosexual persons may affect the police officers’ decisions, which would constitute a violation of the anti-discriminative norms they are obliged to protect. There are two goals of this research project: first, to determine the existence of differences in attitudes towards
homosexuals between students of the Police College in Zagreb, Croatia, and students enrolled in other study programs; second, to determine the predictive ability of gender, age, contact with homosexual persons, basic political beliefs, and the importance of religion and attending religious services in explaining attitudes toward lesbians and gay men among Police College students and students of other study programs. The survey was conducted in the academic year 2014/15, among the Police College students, as well as those enrolled in law schools, and programs in social pedagogy, social work, and psychology. Police College students expressed more negative attitudes towards lesbians and gay men. Age, contact, and political beliefs are confirmed as statistically significant predictors of attitudes towards lesbians among the Police College students, while gender, contact, political beliefs, and religion are statistically significant for the other students. Among the former group, significant predictors of attitudes toward gay men are gender, age, contact, and political beliefs while gender, political beliefs and religion have been found statistically significant among the other students.

Keywords

attitudes; homosexual persons; ATLG scale; students; Police College

Hrčak ID:

162566

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/162566

Publication date:

27.7.2016.

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