Lay Conceptions of Sexual Orientation Groups: United States Convenience Samples, 2012

Researchers aimed to characterize certain features of lay beliefs and attitudes surrounding sexual orientation groups, with a particular focus on conceptions of bisexual people. In brief, participants were recruited without explicitly calling attention to their own sexual orientation, but with a number of intentional steps to make the study visible to sexual minorities. The study asked participants a series of questions about issues related to sexuality, gender, and sexual orientation. Most notably, in the middle section of the study, participants were randomly assigned to consider one group in-depth: heterosexual women, heterosexual men, bisexual women, bisexual men, homosexual women, and homosexual men. (The adjective structure was kept consistent for all 6 groups.) Participants responded to a number of attitude and belief items about their assigned target group, including beliefs about the controllability and stability of the group's sexual orientation and guesses about the personality characteristics of group members.