Running Head: REPRESENTATION AND ATTITUDES 1

Abstract

This study aims to explore how LGBTQ+ representation in media can impact societal

attitudes towards the community. Exposure to LGBTQ+ characters, influencers, and celebrities

through media can create strong parasocial relationships between the individual consuming the

media and the community. This connection can have a large impact on the way the individual

forms their beliefs or opinions, affecting the way they view the LGBTQ+ community. Increased

LGBTQ+ representation in movies and television have been found to have significant positive

effects on societal attitudes, and this study furthers the discussion to digital media. Digital media,

otherwise known as social media, YouTube, and other streaming platforms, has increased

accessibility to LGBTQ+ related content and can have the same impact on societal beliefs that

more traditional forms of media have had. Thus, increasing exposure of LGBTQ+ content on

digital media can lead to more positive societal attitudes towards the community. This study

explores this relationship by utilizing an experimental design that exposes participants to

LGBTQ+ related content through digital media and measuring their attitudes towards the

community with a pretest and posttest survey.

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Impacting Societal Attitudes With LGBTQ+ Representation in Media

The importance of representation is always discussed in terms of increasing positive self

identity within the community being portrayed, but it has also been found to have an effect on

individuals who are not part of the community. The Birth of A Nation is a film that has been

found to perpetuate and spread harmful negative stereotypes about the African American

community, causing its White audience to enforce those racist beliefs through their actions in

society (Parsons, 2015). Media has a significant influence on those who are participating in it,

and this has only become more true with the rise of digital media. With media becoming so

easily accessible and connecting users to every corner of the world, I want to explore how this

media can be used to facilitate positive change. The LGBTQ+ community is heavily

marginalized, but there has been significant progress in recent years in terms of American

policies (Harper & Schneider, 2003). Although all the credit can not be given to just the media,

one can not deny that the increase in LGBTQ+ representation in media played a role in changing

these attitudes. If it is found to be true that exposure to LGBTQ+ communities through mediated

forms of contact, like social media, can create more support for these groups in society, then it

will justify the argument for more representation of all marginalized groups in the media.

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Rationale

Contact/Secondary Contact Effect theory

Contact theory explains how face to face interactions can be used as a means to improve

intergroup relations (Sink & Mastro, 2018). Simply put, it describes how people form bonds with

people they meet or speak to. It is near impossible to form a connection with a person or

community without ever interacting with them, but with media, face to face communication can
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be facilitated through television or movies (Sink & Mastro, 2018). It was found that individuals

who were able to recall a television show with a gay male character and knew a specific gay

character were less likely to be homonegative, meaning that respondents who engaged with

media that had gay representation felt more positively towards the community (Sink & Mastro,

2018). A more recent theory that builds upon these findings is secondary contact theory.

Secondary contact theory takes two separate groups, the primary outgroup and the secondary

outgroup, and uses an individual's experience with the primary outgroup to predict their attitudes

towards the secondary outgroup (Lissitsa & Kushnirovich, 2020).This study used the LGBTQ+

community as the primary outgroup and people with Asperger’s Disorder as the secondary

outgroup. To measure attitudes towards the communities, the researchers asked participants what

their desired social distance would be with people who identified within the community with

friends being the closest distance. They also explored how types of portrayals in media (negative

or positive) and frequency of exposure may affect attitudes as well. Their strongest finding was

that respondents who had frequent exposure to neutral portrayals of the LGBTQ+ community

were more likely to have positive attitudes towards the community and to have shorter social

distance from people with Asperger’s Disorder (Lissitsa & Kushnirovich, 2020).

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Parasocial Relationships

A parasocial relationship can be described as one sided, where the connection is only felt

by the individual watching the content, while the subject of the content, a character, influencer,

or celebrity, knows nothing about the individual and feels nothing towards them (Massey et al.,

2021). However, this does not mean the parasocial relationship goes unknown by the subject, in

fact many influencers and celebrities use the relationships their viewership develops with them
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as a marketing tool (Chung & Cho, 2017). Parasocial relationships can do more than just

increase sales, as it can have an impact on the individual's political beliefs as well. In 2015,

olympic medalist and reality show star, Caitlyn Jenner, revealed her transgender identity and

publically transitioned from her dead name Bruce to Caitlyn. A study found that respondents

who believed Jenner’s story represented positive change in society were more likely to engage

with the story and support trangender policies (Miller et al., 2020). This same trend can be seen

with fictional characters as well. Another study had participants watch television show

Transparent, which features a transgender character who transitions from their dead name

Morton to Maura during the show. The study found that those who watched episodes with Maura

and felt empathy towards the character were more likely to have positive attitudes towards

transgender people and felt negatively towards a bathroom bill that forces individuals to use the

bathroom of their assigned sex rather than self-identified gender (Massey et al., 2021).

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Representation in Digital Media

Traditional forms of media can be defined as movies, television, even the news. These

forms of media are still present today, however they have taken a backseat to digital media, a

newer form of communication that connects every corner of the globe together. Digital media is

any form of social media, Twitter, Instagram, FaceBook, even the most recent entertainment app

TikTok (Lissitsa & Kushnirovich, 2020). YouTube and streaming platforms like Twitch are also

relatively new entertainment media that falls under the digital media umbrella (Kurtinet al.,

2018). These platforms only increased the influence that content creators have over their

viewership, as these pieces of media can be shared instantaneously around the world, making

accessibility a problem of the past. Digital media has been found to facilitate the same parasocial
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relationships that traditional media has in the past, and the same can be said about contact theory

as it can be argued that new forms of media better mediate face to face communication than the

old forms (Lissitsa & Kushnirovich, 2020). Easily accessible representation, paired with

parasocial relationships and contact theory creates a space for more acceptance which is being

seen with younger generations (Ayoub & Garretson, 2017). Younger populations are more likely

to use these forms of digital media, which has been used as reasoning as to why they are more

liberal leaning than generations in the past (Ayoub & Garretson, 2017). It was also found that

users with high exposure to the LGBTQ+ community were more likely to contact LGBTQ+

people offline and have positive attitudes towards the community in real life (Lissitsa &

Kushnirovich, 2020).

It has been found that there is a positive correlation between the exposure an individual

has to the LGBTQ+ community and their attitude towards the community. When taking digital

media into account, this trend should be continued. Those who interact with LGTBQ+ related

content or creators through social media and entertainment platforms like YouTube, will be more

likely to have positive attitudes towards the community. Based on this rationale, I hypothesize

that:

H1: Exposure to the LGBTQ+ community through digital media will lead to more

positive attitudes towards the community.