| When otherwise "normal" people are associated with a stigmatized person, they may become stigmatized by association. Much like people possessing primary stigma, people possessing an associative stigma may be motivated to conceal (or reveal) the associative stigma to an audience. For example, when will a mother tell conservative coworkers about her gay son, or when will a White woman tell her racist parents that her new boyfriend is Black? This dissertation attempts to determine when people will make the decision to disclose their associative stigma (association with a non-heterosexual, in the case of this dissertation) by sketching a preliminary model for associative stigma disclosure, involving three major categories of predictive antecedents: stigma characteristics, environmental factors, and internal psychological processes. This dissertation also attempted to verify this model by gathering correlational evidence (study 1) as well as some experimental evidence (study 2) for it, and found data generally consistent with the model. |
