WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly

From the perspective of critical psychology, I offer one example of a survey instrument—developed with and through queer theoretical frames—that reflects a commitment both to statistical rigor and feminist objectivity. This instrument, the Sexual Orientation Beliefs Scale (SOBS), examines complex relationships between heterosexist attitudes and ontologies of sexuality—in other words, beliefs about what sexual orientation actually is. I argue that the SOBS’s unique analytic potential is to reveal relationships between attitudes and beliefs that are otherwise obscured by hegemonic discourse about biological essentialism. Finally, I introduce the results of one study that took a “person-centered” analytic approach, as opposed to a “variable-centered” approach, and found evidence of the weakness of biological-determinist beliefs about sexual orientation in distinguishing between individuals with high versus low levels of modern homonegativity. I suggest that with queer theory-informed instrumentation, this person-centered approach possesses a provisional capacity to function as a “queer method.”