Intolerance and education in Ireland

Intolerance is a terrible thing. In fact I have no time for people who are intolerant. String 'em up, I say. So I thought it would be interesting to see what are (some) of the characteristics of people who are intolerant. The instrument I use is a question in the European Social Survey which asks whether the respondent thinks "gays & lesbians should be free to live their life as they wish". Its a 5 category answer and I define a dummy which is 1 for the top 2 categories ("agree strongly" or "agree"), 0 otherwise. About 75% are tolerant by this criterion, using the Irish data. So we are a pretty tolerant bunch, according to ourselves anyway.
Below I have a simple model. The coefficients are marginal effects. So what the results show is that each additional year of education is associated with about a 7% higher probability of being tolerant (remember 7% relative to 75%). If you are reading this you are probably fairly educated so this will conform with your prior view (i.e. your prejudice): educated people are nice people. Older people are less tolerant towards gays. Well what do you expect? Likewise people who describe themselves as religious. Women are the good guys, being much more (20%) tolerant than men.
What is curious is that parental education has the opposite effect to one's own education, the more educated your father was the less tolerant you are towards gays. Parental education is a big, perhaps the biggest, determinant, of one's socio-economic status. Its an interesting paradox: answers please on a post-card...

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tolerant towards gays
---------------------------------------------
years education 0.0681***
(4.94)

age -0.00532*
(2.22)

woman 0.210**
(2.96)

very religious -0.311***
(4.12)

father's education -0.0823**
(2.61)

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N 1631
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Absolute t statistics in parentheses
* p<0.05,>

Some Like It Hot

Paul Gottemoller and Randolph Burnside from the Department of Political Science at Southern Illinois University have written a paper entitled "Are They Still Hot?: Utilizing Feeling Thermometers and Anchoring Vignettes to Measure Affect". Paper available here. Abstract here.

The authors recount how "feeling thermometers" have been used in survey research since the beginnings of modern survey research - this is a way to ascertain individual feelings in a multitude of settings. They emphasise that it is difficult to compare one respondent’s self-ranking to another respondent’s self-ranking, because different respondents may be using different criteria to evaluate their feelings towards the group.

The authors describe how using anchoring vignettes corrects for these problems by providing respondents with 5 vignettes representing different areas of the 101 degree thermometer scale. Respondents are asked to place each vignette on the feeling thermometer and also rank themselves.

It is suggested that an added value of using anchoring vignettes for feeling thermometers is that socially undesirable feeling will be easier to detect. The use of anchoring vignettes in this study provides preliminary evidence of their effectiveness when examining feelings towards African Americans and homosexuals.