Homophobic Content Agent Target Scale (Poteat & Espelage. 2005)

• Populations: Adolescents, Young Adults
• Age ranges: 11-19
• Languages: English, Spanish
• Countries: Spain; United States

Items

Subscales:

• Agent 
• Target 

Items by subscale

English:

Agent

Item Stem:  “Some kids call each other names such as gay, lesbo, fag, etc. How many times in the last week did you say these things to . . . .”

• a friend
• Someone I did not know
• someone I did not like
• Someone I thought was gay
• Someone I did not think was gay

Target

Item Stem:  “How many times in the last week did the following people call you these things.”

• a friend
• Someone I did not know
• someone who did not like me
• Someone I thought was gay
• Someone I did not think was gay

Responses:

Items used the following response options: “Never,” “1 or 2 times,” “3 or 4 times,” “5 or 6 times,” “7 or more times”

Spanish:

Agente

Item stem:  En los últimos 30 días…

• He llamado a algún amigo con alguna de estas palabras
• Le dije a alguien que no me gustaba con alguna de estas palabras
• He utilizado frases como “eso es de ser gay” en una conversación
• Hice una broma o chiste acerca de los gays, lesbianas o bisexuales
• He propagado un rumor sobre alguien diciendo que es gay, lesbiana o bisexua

Victima

Item stem:  En los últimos 30 días…

• Te ha llamado algún amigo con alguna de estas palabras
• Te ha dicho alguien que tú no lee gustabas con alguna de estas palabras
• Te han dicho frases como “eso es de ser gay” en una conversación
• Te han hecho una broma o chiste acerca de los gays, lesbianas o bisexuales
• Alguien ha propagado un rumor sobre ti diciendo que eres gay, lesbiana o bisexua

taken from (Sánchez‑San Segundo et al., 2020)

Scoring

“Higher scores indicate greater total frequency of homophobic verbal harassment.” (Sánchez‑San Segundo et al., 2020)

“Subscale scores were created for each factor by summing across each of the five items. Higher scores on the Agent
subscale indicate greater use of homophobic content within the past week. Similarly, higher scores on the Target subscale indicate a greater extent of being called these names.” (Poteat & Espelage. 2005)

Citations

Poteat, V. P., & Espelage, D. L. (2005). Exploring the relation between bullying and homophobic verbal content: The homophobic content agent target (HCAT) scale. Violence and Victims, 20(5), 513. https://doi.org/10.1891/088667005780927485

Sánchez-SanSegundo, M., Smith, E., Albaladejo-Blazquez, N., Ferrer-Cascales, R., Ruiz-Robledillo, N., & Perrin, P. B. (2020). Psychometric properties of the spanish version of the homophobic content agent target scale among adolescent students. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 49(5), 1683-1691. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-019-01511-1