Texas Tech University community toward gay adoption: How age groups, gender, and political orientation affected its support for gay parenting
Abstract
The gay adoption issue, with its currently uncertain status in some states, including Texas, will be chosen as a focus of the following paper. In accordance with the purpose of the writing class, this paper aimed to figure out what the Texas Tech University (TTU) community thought about gay adoption. By collecting and analyzing the data of 145 surveys on campus, we learnt that overall, the TTU community approved of gay adoption; the Millennials were more likely to favor gay adoption, the females supported this gay right more strongly than the males, and the Republicans here were less favorable to gay parents. In addition, we were excited to learn that the proponents of gay rights at TTU were less likely to identify a difference in parenting between heterosexual and homosexual couples. (Nam)
Key words: Gay adoption, Texas Tech University, Millennials.
People’s Perception about Gay Marriage & Related Issues
Abstract
This paper explores people’s perception about the issue of gay marriage and adoption, particularly those who are studying or working on the Texas Tech campus. Since the legalization of gay marriage by the Supreme Court in June, 2015, the topic of gay marriage has gained a lot of limelight with the people and the media talking about it more openly. As a result, we decided to survey the people on the Texas Tech campus regarding this issue in order to understand how they felt about it. A total of 145 Americans were surveyed where we asked them about their opinion regarding gay marriage, gay adoption, and stability in the lifestyles of the homosexual couples and the children adopted by them. Many hypotheses and assumptions were made while constructing the survey questions and some surprising yet important results were obtained from this survey.
Keywords: gay marriage, gay adoption, survey, stability. -Harnoor
The perception of same-sex marriage and adoption from TTU members
Abstract ~Ariyawat~
Since the U.S Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriages in June 2015, many conflicts have happened. There was a clerk who refused to issue same-sex marriage, and there was a baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. The argument about allowing same-sex couples to legally adopt children has become more serious. We in the ESL class made this survey to find the perception of TTU members of these problems. We collected data from 145 TTU members with about the same amount of males and females. Most of them were Americans. We found many interesting relations among support for same-sex marriage and adoption, genders, ages, religions and political party.
Keywords: same-sex marriages, adoption
Gay marriages and its related issues – a perspective of TTU community
Abstract
Subsequent to the Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing gay marriages, numerous articles reported varying opinions of the people regarding gay marriage legalization and its related problems. In a similar attempt, a survey was conducted by us on Texas Tech University (TTU) campus to map people’s perception on the same issue. This report clearly expounds the motivation behind such a survey and also draws a correlation between different factors such as political and religious orientation of the people and their effects on people’s opinions on gay marriages. The key findings were that the political and religious orientation of the people play a minor role in their decision regarding gay marriages. Also, people tended to support or oppose gay marriage related issues based on their effect on their freedom of speech and freedom of religion. (Sriramvignesh Mani and Thomas Leverett)
Keywords: gay marriages, political and religious orientation, freedom of speech
Gay Marriage & Issues Survey (Elliot)
Abstract
With the aim to obtain an overview about the opinion of Texas Tech Community in relation to gay marriage issues, a survey was conducted. 145 people were interviewed between students, faculty and workers of the campus. Several sources of information were consulted with the aim to construct a preview scenery about the feeling in relation to gay marriage. Four central topics were identified: Kim Davis’ refusal, baker’s rejections to serve, children’s adoption by gay couples and familiar stability of gay couples. In relation to these central topics, five hypotheses were made which establish a relation between the information previously found and the hypotheses formulated.
The objective of the survey was to get the opinion of Texas Tech Community in order to probe the five hypotheses, but also it was of interest to understand the profile of people who were in one position or another in relation to these matters.
It was possible to prove that millennials were the group that more strongly supported gay marriage. This group also rejected the behavior of Kim Davis when she declined to serve a gay marriage. In this direction, people who supported gay marriage consequently rejected Ms. Davis’ behavior. In this study also a classification by gender was made. The purpose in this type of study was to recognize differences between males and females in issues related with family, but more specifically related to children’s adoption. Suddenly results were found in this part of the study. The woman’s opinion was in opposite direction of the hypotheses formulated. Woman strongly supported children’s adoption and men’s position was mostly neutral.
Last, the right to refusal was studied. Six types of services were recognized and the survey sought to get the people’s opinions in relation to the right that servers could have to refuse each of these services. The results showed a direct relation between services related to religion and the right to reject to serve; particularly a very high support to reject serving was found for pastors and religious agencies of adoption. On the other hand, the right to refuse serving by basic services like access to doctors was strongly rejected.
A deeper and extended discussion of the data found is offered in this study. This part of the study made a contrast between the five hypotheses formulated and the results, and also quantitative records are registered. Finally, an objective analysis of this study was made. In this part of the study the limitations in the representation of the results was exposed. These limitations were based mainly on the small quantity of people interviewed, the poor care that was taken in order to get representative samples of students, faculty and workers from all sections and departments of the campus.
The Americans' Opinion on Gay Marriage Legalization
Abstract
This research is about same-sex/gay marriage and its relevance to America. Gay marriage means marriage between partners of the same sex. On June 26th 2015, The Supreme Court of the U.S.A legalized gay marriage. Even after The Supreme Court verdict on gay marriage, still there is a difference in opinions among American people about accepting the gay couple in the society. As per the statistics, the political orientation and religion of people deeply affect their opinion on gay marriage. Another important factor which affects overall opinion is that most of the people in one age group (millennial Americans, age 18-34) accept gay marriage compared to the older Americans. So due to this reason, as part of a class project, we decided to conduct a survey to understand the change in opinion among various students in Texas Tech University. The main purpose of the survey is to distinguish the opinion between male and female undergraduates, graduates and faculty, Americans and international students. Texas Tech University is a good place to collect the data as it contains a good mixture of people. Before conducting the survey, four hypotheses were introduced and a questionnaire was created in such a way that from the analysis of the results, all of the hypotheses could be proved. A total of 145 of surveys were conducted, out of which 70 were males and 75 were females. Over all opinion shows that most of the millennial Americans support the idea of gay marriage. (Sankar Manalilkada Sasidharan)
Gay marriage survey report
Abstract
Gay marriage became legal recently, but many problems occurred which were out of government’s expectations. Same-sex adoption was one of these issue. Lots of social scientists had investigated the social perception about gay marriage and they had published plenty of their work online. Noticing that people of different ages, races, religions, genders, and political parties might have different opinions on this issue, we made a survey to investigate the perceptions about gay marriage of Texas Tech community and compared them to the poll results made by the social scientists. To better illustrate the data, we plotted charts in Excel as showed in the appendix. From the result we found that with regard to the gay marriage issue, people were more intended to support it instead of oppose it. (Jieying Wu)
Investigating real opinion about gay marriage among the young students in Texas Tech University
Abstract
This study shows how Texas Tech University students think about gay marriage. This research paper was written after a survey was done with 145 students. In the survey, 88% of the students were Americans; the others were international students. The survey form contained 17 questions about gender, age and nationality, and several questions about gay marriage and issues. We found that Texas Tech students supported the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing gay marriage and didn’t support Kim Davis's refusal. At the same time, the TTU students supported children’s adoption by gay couples and agreed that gay adoption would not affect children’s upbringing. Meanwhile, the TTU students thought that gay couples were as stable as the heterosexual couples. We believe that this study will lead the way to further studies about gay marriage. (Songhe Li)
Keywords: gay marriage, TTU, American
Thursday, December 17, 2015
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Gay marriage survey report
Gay marriage survey report
Abstract
Gay marriage
became legal recently, but many problems occurred which were out of
government’s expectations. Same-sex adoption was one of these issue. Lots of
social scientists had investigated the social perception about gay marriage and
they had published plenty of their work online. Noticing that people of
different ages, races, religions, genders, and political parties might have
different opinions on this issue, we made a survey to investigate the
perceptions about gay marriage of Texas Tech community and compared them to the
poll results made by the social scientists. To better illustrate the data, we
plotted charts in Excel as showed in the appendix. From the result we found
that to gay marriage issue, people were more intended to support it instead of
oppose it. (Jieying Wu)
Introduction
June 26th,
2015 was a big date for same-sex couples since gay-marriage legalization was
extended to all states in the United States. This decision was certainly a
revolution to LGBTs (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) because they no
longer needed to hide their status from the society. However, the law ruled by
the Supreme Court did not always represent the public will. A series of
problems occurred after that, such as religious objection and the gay adoption
issue. Gay adoption had attracted increasing attention recently. Currently
there were 49 states that allow gay adoption; nevertheless, some people were
still concerned that this might have negative effects on children who were
raised by same-sex couples, and there was a survey indicating that gay adoption
still had the lowest acceptance of U.S. citizens (The Millennial Generation and
the Future of Gay and Lesbian Rights, 2011). However, the trend of LGBTs’
acceptance was growing generally, and young people tended to be more hospitable
to it. We were in the Texas Tech University community, and from the materials
we had read we found there were differences based on ages, genders, political
parties, and religions when facing the gay marriage issues. What we were
interested in was how our community thought about this issue. As a result, we
made a survey and collected samples on the Texas Tech campus to study their
perceptions towards LGBTs and tried to figure out whether it would be different
from the poll results we found.
Literature review
The approval of gay marriage gave a
great joy to LGBTs. However, legalization was just the first step; this news
also brought the conflict between gay supporters and opponents into the
spotlight. The religious opposition was one of the issues. Kim Davis was famous
for her refusal to license gay couples (Holpuch, 2015). She thought that the
government changed her job, and she could not stand in line with gay people as
a Christian. Kim Davis is not alone; similar conflict happened in Colorado. A
Christian baker named Philips was sued because he refused to bake a cake for a
gay couple (Green, 2015). In the end, the Colorado Court forced the baker to
comply with the law, which caused dissatisfaction among the gay opponents. Besides
this, heated debates and arguments about gay adoption were also very popular.
According to the report written by Lewin, the state of Mississippi allowed gay
adoption in 2000; but now it had become the only state to forbid it (Lewin,
2015). The gay adoption opponents were worried that same-sex couples will bring
negative effects to children; children might be more likely to be gay or have
distortion of personality after they grow up. On the contrary, the supporters
thought that homosexual couples were the same as heterosexual couples; they were
able to provide a healthy environment for children’s growth. The truth was,
even though gay adoption became legal, same-sex couples would still meet a lot
of inconveniences when they adopted children. An article published by Bagnall
indicated that the healthcare market was just a beginning to LGBTs; when gay
couples were facing the issues such as choosing schools or visiting doctors for
their children, the process would be more complicated than for others (Bagnall,
2015). There was a survey supporting this point; it pointed out that gay
adoption still had the lowest acceptance of U.S. citizens (The Millennial
Generation and the Future of Gay and Lesbian Rights, 2011). There were many
other surveys which investigated the social acceptance of LGBT. A survey named
“Growing support for same-sex marriage” showed that supporters of LGBT increased
rapidly and exceeded the number of opponents in recent decades (Growing support
for same-sex marriage, 2013). The other survey presented an increasing trend of
LGBT supporters similarly, but it figured out that there were differences based
on ages and political parties (New poll proves national majority support
same-sex marriage, 2013). This survey points out that Democrats are most
hospitable to gay people while the Republicans are comparably conservative to
this issue. For the surveys we have read they all make a same conclusion: that
young people are more accepting of gay relationships; and Millennials (born
after 1980) present the highest favor to it.
Hypotheses
From what we have read so far, we can
make some basic hypotheses about the social attitudes towards LGBTs as below:
1. People born after 1980 are more
likely to accept gay marriage;
2. People born before 1980 might be more
likely to keep silent on this issue or be objective about it; if they are gay
supporters, they are very likely have been the opponents originally and changed
their mind from the past for some reasons;
3. If people do not approve of gay
marriage, then they are more likely to disagree with gay adoption as well;
4. Democrats are more likely to agree
with gay marriage; independents might share a similar view; but Republicans are
more likely to disagree with this issue;
5. Religious people might have lower
acceptance of gay marriage and gay adoption than non-religious people.
We were interested in what the
perception of the Texas Tech community who would respond to our survey was and
whether their answers would be concordant to our hypotheses.
Methods
In
order to investigate the Texas Tech community’s perceptions of gay marriage, we
discussed a survey to collect samples from students or staff working in Texas
Tech University. As mentioned in the hypotheses above, we were interested in
the differences based on ages, genders, religions and political parties.
Therefore, in our survey, we asked people about their genders, ages, religions
and political parties at the very first beginning. Also, according to our
reviews of news and literature, we noticed that old people were more likely to
disagree with LGBTs. However, since the world became more and more accepting of
this issue, some of the gay marriage opponents would change their mind
afterwards. The reasons for them to change their mind, which would be asked in
the survey, were also one of our interests. To better illustrate people’s
feeling towards gay marriage and gay adoption, we provided the Likert scale
(from 1 to 5 as strongly disagree to strong agree) to the respondents to see
how much they agreed or disagreed with these two issues. Moreover, in our point
of view, people who accepted gay marriage were more likely to agree with gay
adoption, too. In the gay adoption part, respondents would be asked questions
about what the most important thing was when finding an adoptive home, and
whether they thought gay parents would be different from others. Considering
the religious reasons, Kim Davis and the Christian bakers are well known,
because of their refusal to give services to gay couples; we asked people their
attitudes towards them, and in what situations they felt people would have the
rights to refuse to serve gays. Based on the questions above, we had an
agreement to collect samples; all of the samples must be in the Texas Tech
community; they could be students or faculty. At the end, we collected 145
samples in total; one of them forgot about the back of the survey, and that one
was discarded. All of the data was input into Excel to tabulate the results. In
general, the survey was not representative in some reasons. First, the number
of sample was very small compared to the population of Texas Tech community.
Second, most of the respondents were undergraduate students, so we could hardly
compare the acceptance differences based on different ages. Moreover, the data
was not collected randomly in the campus, some of them were collected in the
church group or in specific departments, which might skew the data trend. Also,
people from different majors would probably have different perceptions of gay
marriage. For example, it was reasonable to know that students who majored in
art would be more likely to support gay couples, since many of the famous
designers and artists were gay. However, in our survey, we did not track this
information, so it might be one of the factors that affected the data accuracy.
For the survey itself, some of the questions were not clear to the respondents;
and they would skip questions if they did not understand, which led to surveys
that we not completed. For instance, not all the people knew Kim Davis, and
since they did not care who she was, they would just give a random answer or
leave it blank on the sheet. What’s more, we designed some short questions for
the respondents to answer, such as the reasons they agreed or disagreed with
gay adoption. Based on the answers, many of the respondents would put ‘No
difference’ on the sheet, but we did not think that was always valid because
they might be too lazy to give an illustration. Next time, we should put all
the questions as choice questions and try to make the questions as brief as
possible. Overall, this was the first time for us to do survey on campus. With
all the experiences we had, I believe next time our survey will be more
comprehensive.
Results
In our survey,
we collected 145 samples in total; 70 respondents were male and 75 were
females. Since we intended to study Americans’ perceptions of gay marriage in
the Texas Tech community, we made an agreement to collect data from Americans
who worked or studied on the campus. At the end, 80% Americans took part in the
survey, but the range of the ages was uneven; the number of respondents who
were younger than 30 years old occupied 90%. Therefore, our study in people of
different ages would have different views towards gay marriage might not be
very convincible. In the end, we inputted all the data into Excel and made
chart to compare the data. Here were some of our results with respect to the
previous hypotheses.
1. We made a hypothesis
that people born after 1980 might be neutral or disagree about this issue. If
they were gay supporters, they might change their mind from the past. Based on the
figure 1, 21% of people who were older than 60 years old admitted that they
were gay opponents before, while 17% of people who were 50 to 59 years old had
changed their mind. However, people younger than 50 years old who had changed
their minds just occupied less than 10% to the total amount of the sample.
Therefore, it was true that older people were more likely to be gay marriage
opponents before and they were more likely than other generations to change their
minds.
2. As shown in figure
2, for the relationship between gay marriage to gay adoption, we could see that
if people were strongly disagreed with gay marriage, they would show similar
opinion towards gay adoption. The respondents were required to choose how much
they agreed or disagreed to gay marriage and gay adoprtion in the Likert scale.
The result shown that 35% of people who were strongly disagreed with gay
adoption were strongly disagreed with gay marriage, and 38% of people who
slightly disagreed with gay adoption strongly disagreed with gay marriage.
However, the percentage decreased if people accepted gay adorpion (choose 4 or
5 in the Likert scale), no one strongly disagreed with gay marriage when they
chose 3 in the Likert scale of gay adoption, and only 8% of them who strongly
agree gay adoption were strongly disagreed with gay marriage. From the survey,
people who approved with gay adoption would think that gay couples had no
difference to homosexual couples. But people who disagreed with this issue
would more likely to have the points that children raised by gay couples would
be different than other children.
3. With respect to the
policital parties’ perception of gay marriage, we also had a valid suspicion.
From figure 3 we could see that Democrats (83% acceptance) was the most
friendly political party to gay marriage while Independents (71% acceptance)
shared the similar trend with it. However, Republicans (17% acceptance) still
stuck on their views and more of them were opponents to this issue.
4. Figure 4 shown us
the effect of religions. It was obvious that religion did effect people’s view
of gay marriage. The more people’s were involved into their religion, the more
likely for them to disagree with gay marriage. But people who disliked religion
would be more accepting of this issue than people who had no religion. 38% of
people who were very seriously involved into their religions were strongly
disagreed with gay marriage, and 6% of people who were slightly into their
religion were slightly disagreed with gay marriage. 7% of people with no
religion were strongly disagreed with gay marriage. But no one who were
disliked religion was disagreed with gay marriage.
5. We suspected that people born after 1980
were more likely to accept gay marriage. As shown in figure 5, we could see the
percentages of people cannot accept gay marriage (red part) would go up by the
ages getting older. But as we just had seven people who were older than 40
years old, the data could hardly be representive. However, overall we could
tell younger people were more hopitable to this issue than older people.
After all, even though
we have flaws in our data that the ages’ distribution of samples was uneven,
which led to the result that in the older ages our data was not representative,
we did have valid evidence to prove our hypotheses. To sum up, the result shown
that ages, religion, polictical parties did have great effect on people’s
opinions towards LGBTs, and the perceptions of the Texas Tech community on the
gay marriage issue were concordant to the trend of Americans.
Discussion
From the results, our major findings
were the following:
First, if people were born after 1980
and they were gay supporters, they were more likely than the younger generation
to have changed their minds in the past. As gay marriage issues have become
more and more popular nowadays, I learned that most of them changed their
attitudes because their friends or families’ members were gay. This was
reasonable, since we all loved our family and friends, and although they were
homosexual, it did not change the way they treated us. In fact, gay opponents
were the ones who hurt the gay supporters. In our research, even though the
number of people older than 35 was not a lot compared to the Millennials, over
half of them indicated that they had changed their minds in the past. To some
extent, I thought our suspicion was valid.
Second, if someone agreed with gay
marriage, he or she would be more likely to accept gay adoption as well. Based
on the results, most people thought that the most important thing to children
was the parental love. In the survey, respondents were asked questions about
the reasons they supported or opposed gay adoption. The results showed that in
gay supporters’ perspective, they thought that there was no difference between
LGBTs and heterosexual couples. Compared to single families or unstable
families (such as domestic violence, low income, etc.), they believed gay
couples were able to give a healthy family to children. Actually, there are thousands
of orphans in the world, having a warm family was their dreams. People thought
that it was unfair to prevent them from being adopted.
Third, political parties had different
opinions about gay marriages. The result showed that Democrats were the
friendliest ones to this issue, and independents exhibited a similar trend; but
Republicans were more conservative to this issue. From the data, about half of
the samples were Independents, and their voice was consistent with what we
studied from the other research.
Fourth, the result proved that people
who were involved in religions would be more likely to disagree with gay
marriage. However, the ratio of religious people who accepted gay marriage was
greater than what we expected. In fact, many of the respondents who regarded
them as Christians in this survey supported gay marriage, which was kind of
opposite to what we thought about the religions. As we known, some religions
were against gay marriage. For instance, in the Bible, it was written that gay couples
were not allowed by God, and they should not be blessed for their
relationships, let alone allowing their marriages. Therefore, people involved
deeply in Christianity, like Kim Davis, should be opposed to gay marriages, but
the fact told us this was not true. Also, one point we needed to highlight here
was that we had collected data from a Christian group, and since the students
discussed when they were answering the questions, they might hide their true
voice about the questions. For example, if a student saw his friends were all
hospitable to gay couples, even though he disliked the LGBTs, he would lie to
the survey in order to please his friends. As a result, in the future we should
collect the sample randomly and separately to increase the data validity.
Fifth, we found out that people who
older than 35 years old would be more likely to be opposed to gay marriage.
Nevertheless, we had trouble to find elder people in campus, thus the number of
people born after 1980 was much less than the number of Millennials. The result
and analyses of this hypothesis might not be representative. Nevertheless, if
we took a look for their opinions towards gay marriage and gay adoption, we did
found some valid points. The percentage of elder people to change their mind
from gay opponents and gay supporters was greater than younger generations, and
they were actually more accepting of this issue than what we thought. Based on
the results we got so far, the reason was mainly because their friends or
family members had once admitted that they were gay, as the world became more
and more opened to this issue.
Considering this was the first time for
us to make a survey, we were not prepared perfectly and had a lot of
deficiencies to improve. However, each of us learned a lot in this experience,
and we all felt excited to prove our hypotheses. Talking about the lessons we
learned, at the very beginning, we just considered the genders should be even
in the data, and neglected the other elements such as ages, religions, race and
political parties. We admitted that the ages were not even, which led results
to be unrepresentative, but the gender ratio in our survey agreed well with that
of Texas Tech’s. Moreover, some of the data were not collected randomly and
separately which might skew the data trend. For example, people majoring in
engineering might be more introverted and therefore became relatively
conservative towards gay people, but people majoring in art or music might be
more opened to it, since many of the artists and designers were gay. As a
result, next time we should expand the sample number and try our best to get
more elder people involved into our survey. What’s more, in order to increase
the authenticity of the result, we need to separate the participants, making
sure that they will not discuss with each other. We admitted that this survey
was not perfect, but it did not mean that we were not working hard on it. In
order to prepare well for the survey, we spent weeks reading the reports and
literatures to make the assumptions. Besides that, we made two drafts for the
survey and discussed the way to collect data. To better illustrate the data, we
learned how to draw plots and charts from Excels. Although we were not perfect,
we have tried our best.
Conclusions
Based
on the results and data analysis, our major finding was that Texas Tech
community’s perceptions about gay marriage and gay adoption were basically
followed the trend of the United States, which indicated that Texans were not
introversive as what we thought. Moreover, we were surprised to learn that
elder people were actually quite opened to gay couples; the reason for that may
have been that their family members or friends admitted they were gay in the
past. In fact, media provided a great impetus to this issue. If you turned on
the television, gay was no longer strange to us; we could meet gay couples on
the TV shows and newspaper. As a result, many of people announced that they
were gay and tried to have normal lives as others did. If one of our family
members or friends became gay, it was nearly impossible for us to cut our
relationship to them. In this case, we had to accept gay couples. According to
our lecture reviews and the survey result, we found that this was the most
effective way to turn a gay opponent into a gay supporter. Another surprise we
found was that some of people involved deeply in their religions, such as
Christians, would accept gay couple as well. Of course, we had to admit that
our data was not enough to make this conclusion very confidently, but based on
what we got so far, half of the Christians would support gay couples, which
means that they would go against the Bible to support gay couples. In this
case, it seemed that religion was not as oppose as what we thought towards
LGBT. Moreover, many of us notice that the trend of gay acceptance became
larger and larger nowadays, many of the young people did not regard that gay
couples should be an issue. In their mind, the difference between heterosexual
and homosexual couples was as natural as the genders’ difference. In the gay
adoption part, most of the gay supporters also agreed with gay adoption; they
thought that gay couples were able to offer financial and mental support to
children. Compared to the violent families or bankrupt families, gay couples
were better than all of them. People who supported gay adoption thought that it
was unfair to deprive thousands of orphans’ chances to enter in a warm family. Overall,
all of the classmates and the teachers in our class made a lot of efforts in
this survey, and we did have some valid hypotheses. This was a very interesting
experience for all of us since we had never made a survey before. To better give
a survey, we read a lot of reports and lectures to learn what factors would
affect a person’s attitude towards gay issues. We made summaries and
commentaries before making the hypotheses. Under the guide by our teacher, we
made two drafts for the survey sheet and discussed the way to collect samples.
Actually, it was very exciting to see how people responded to our survey,
especially when their answers were different from what we thought. In this
process, we were not just getting the skill for making a survey. More
importantly, we developed team working skills; and data analysis skills, all of
these would be very helpful to our future careers.
Appendix
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Gallup.com. Retrieved on September 11, 2015 from:
Gallup.com. Retrieved on September 11, 2015 from:
Tuesday, December 1, 2015
Investigating real opinion about gay marriage among the young students in Texas Tech University
Abstract
This study shows how Texas Tech University students think about gay
marriage. This research paper was written after a survey was done with 145
students. In the survey, 88% of the students were Americans; the others were
international students. The survey form contained 17 questions about gender,
age and nationality, and several questions about gay marriage and issues. We
found that Texas Tech students supported the Supreme Court’s decision
legalizing gay marriage and didn’t support Kim Davis's refusal. At the same
time, the TTU students supported children’s adoption by gay couples and agreed
that gay adoption would not affect children’s upbringing. Meanwhile, the TTU
students thought that gay couples were as stable as the heterosexual couples.
We believe that this study will lead the way to further studies about gay
marriage.(Songhe Li)
Keywords: gay marriage, TTU,
American
Introduction
The numbers of gay marriages are
escalating at a rapid rate, have become important nowadays, and are impacting
all aspects of our social life. Gay marriage looks like a small village under
the big country, but it also brings some advantages and disadvantages in the
daily life, along with the issue about the gay marriage itself.
Since gay marriage became legal
in 2015, gays have become able to get licenses from 50 states for same-sex
marriage (Green, 2015). The government allows people to comment and watch in
full freedom that the same-sex license can help show the human right. Many
people disagree with giving the license to the same-sex couple. For example,
Kim Davis, a clerk in Kentucky, refused to give licenses to the same-sex couple
citing "God's authority" (Dunkin, 2014). Two gay couples and
two straight couples sued her, and she was thrown into jail. And there was a
debate about religious liberty versus the civil rights afforded to all U.S.
citizens.
There are several researchers
who also discuss the relationship of gay marriage among students. Anna Twite
(2015) says, “I don't understand why gay marriage and marriage equality is even
an issue. People should just accept that not everyone feels the same way about
love.” In fact there are several
differences between male students and female students and American students and
international students; moreover, there are differences among graduate students
and undergraduate students. The argument about gay marriage will continue between
different kinds of people, and that is a natural issue.
In the fall 2015 semester, the
class of ESL 5301 conducted research about Texas Tech students’ opinions of gay
marriage. Since this social phenomenon is enormously popular, we thought it
would be useful and interesting to investigate how Texas Tech students thought
about the same-sex marriage. In this research, each student took the same
survey research about some topics, in order to get the real opinion among the
students in Texas Tech University. I will provide information in the
methods section about how this research was conducted.
Literature Review
Gay marriage is an important
part of our social life. After gay marriage became legalized in 2015 (Green,
2015), most Americans supported gay marriage legalization and felt that gays
should share the same rights as others (Bagnall, 2015). And Americans thought
the reason for gay marriage is because they love each other just like the
heterosexual (Levy, 2015). Especially among students, they also thought that love should be free,
and people should not be bullied over whom they love (Twite, 2015). On the
other hand, a few Americans have negative opinions on gay marriage (Jones, 2011,
July). One of Kentucky's Clerks, Ms. Davis, refused to
issue marriage licenses to gay couples because of "God's authority”
(Dunkin, 2014). This has become an issue in the United States (Clements, 2011).
Two gay couples and two straight couples sued her and she was thrown into jail
(Dunkin, 2014). And there was a debate about religious liberty versus the civil
rights afforded to all U.S. citizens (McCarthy, 2015).
Gay adoption has become another
famous issue along with gay marriage. Most American states such as Kentucky,
Georgia, Missouri, Louisiana, Ohio and South Dakota now have given permission
for gay couples to adopt (Somashekhar,
2015); others such as Texas and Michigan have been
“creating new roadblocks to gay adoption”, by allowing religious groups to
intervene in gay adoption (Beitsch, 2015).
Most Americans supported
adoption by same-sex couples (Pew Research Center, 2013), and this number has
been increasing, according to a survey (Jones, 2011); it also shows
the highest support age-group was 18-29(it was 77%); and the lowest support
age-group was 65 and older (it was 51%) (Swift, 2014).
It was hypothesized that male
students would support gay marriage more than female students, because male
students, are more open than female students; moreover, the male students
sometimes will express the real emotions more open mindedly than female
students. On the other hand, we thought that Texas Tech students would believe
that gay adoption would not affect children’s upbringing. This research showed
how Texas Tech University students felt about the effects of gay marriage.
Hypotheses
-Texas Tech students would
support the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing gay marriage.
- Texas Tech students would not support Kim Davis's refusal
- The TTU students would support children’s adoption by gay couples.
- The TTU students would agree that the gay adoption would not
affect children’s upbringing.
- The TTU students would think that the gay couples were as stable as
the heterosexual couples.
Methods
Texas Tech University students were used in this research. Texas Tech
University is a research university located in Lubbock, Texas, the southwest
part of the USA. The university has 13 colleges and more than 150 courses(TTU,
2015). The current enrollment of students is about 35,893, including
approximately 91% of Americans and 9% international students. Most of the
students come from Texas (TTU, 2015). As we knew, TTU is a fairly
typical public American university and its students are a fairly typical sample
of American university students. Moreover, most Texas Tech University students
are young people. Therefore, the opinion of TTU students could be showing the
idea of the students in American universities, even in particular young people.
We collected data about gay marriage and issues related to it. Thomas
Leverett, who teaches ESL 5301-1 course in fall in 2015,
created the questions for this survey; these questions were written by students
who were in the 5301-1 course. The survey form contained 17 questions about
gender, age and nationality, and several questions about gay marriage and
issues. The survey form had 13 simple multiple-choice questions, 2 complex
multiple-choice questions and 2 simple answer questions. In the survey form,
there were two questions that were of most interest. The first one was to ask
the participants whether they agreed with adoption for the same sex couple. And
the second one was to ask whether they thought the gay couples were more stable
than heterosexual couples. The first question was to find out people’s
attitudes toward the adoption of children, while the second one was to find out
people’s attitudes toward the real relationship of gay partners. These two
questions helped us to explore people’s real ideas on the same sex couple.
For conducting surveys, there were some rules and all of the students
followed them. These rules were: Our classmates consisted of nine persons; each
of us collected twelve or more sample surveys of Texas Tech University
students, including at least six female and six male students from the U.S.A.
It did not matter if they were undergraduate, graduate or Ph.D. students. Since
this research showed the survey was used by the American young student
population, we kept asking the questions to those who were born in the USA.
Pollsters could take the survey with some international students. All the
answers must depend on the participants themselves; the surveyors couldn’t give
any suggestions or advice to fill them out; at the same time, the surveyors
couldn’t give any pressure on the participants if they left some questions
blank, unless they forgot to fill out the back of the survey. Most of the
participants were very glad to take these questions and felt interested.
Totally 146 surveys were taken in Texas Tech University. Finally 145
surveys were tabulated; one survey was incomplete. Thus, we obtained 145
surveys in total as original data for our gay marriage and issues survey
research. 75 of them were females and the other 70 were males. Another point
was that the survey included 127 American students and 18 international
students.
Each surveyor had to write a short story or process about how they
conducted the surveys and what difficulties they encountered during
investigation after they finished the survey.
We built an
Excel file to collect the data. The Excel was made by one of our classmates,
Elliot Geikowsky, who collected our survey and data together and then sent us
the final data result. The Excel included all the information about gay
marriage and the issues survey.
Results
In total 145 surveys were filled out. The numbers of female students
were slightly more than those of male students who filled out the survey;
however, they were very close to the same number. 75 of them were females and
the other 70 were males. It also means 51% were female and 49% were male in the
survey. The people who filled out the survey were mostly Americans. Fewer of
them were international students. 127 students in total were Americans; it was about
88%. On the other hand, 18 of the total students were internationals; it was
about 12%. In the American students’ group, 90 Americans, almost 71%, came from
Texas, and the others, about 29%, came from other parts of the U.S.
Our first hypothesis was that
the TTU students would support the Supreme Court’s decision about legalizing
gay marriage. The results of the survey indicated that most
of the students strongly supported the Supreme Court’s decision
legalizing gay marriage. 73 students reported they had a strongly
agreeing attitude about this decision, which meant it got 50% in the survey. 50
students stood for neutrality, or at least they would not choose against this
policy. This meant 35% in the survey. This supported our hypothesis. However,
20 students reported they had a strongly disagreeing attitude about this
decision, which meant it got 14% in the survey. Only 2 students who filled out
the survey said they did not know if the Supreme Court’s decision was right or
not, which means it got 1% in the survey (Chart 1).
The second hypothesis was that “Texas Tech students will not support Kim
Davis's refusal”. We wanted to know what Texas Tech students thought about
that. The survey indicated that Texas Tech students would not support Kim Davis's
refusal. 86 students reported that they thought Kim Davis should do her job;
this means 59% of students didn’t support Kim Davis’ refusal to issue the
license to the same sex couple. 22 of the students thought Kim Davis should
follow her conscience. This also means 15% of students supported Kim Davis’
refusal to issue the license to the same sex couple. Our study also indicated
that the number of students who had no opinion about this event was 32; this
meant 22% in the survey. 5 students who filled out the survey reported that
they did not care about this event; it got 4% in the survey (Chart 2).
Our third hypothesis
was that the TTU students would support children’s adoption by gay couples. For
this information, it was asked whether students believed gay
couples should be able to adopt children. The result that we
received from our survey was more than a half of the students agreed the gay
couple should be able to adopt children. 48 students strongly agreed with gay
adoption; it almost got 33%. 19 students agreed slightly with the gay adoption;
it got 13% in the survey; that attitude is less common than strongly agree.
This supports our hypothesis. 29 students were neutral; it meant 20% students
neither support nor disagree with gay adoption. But 10 students were strongly
disagreeing and 39 students disagreed with this action. The percentages were 7%
and 27% respectively (Chart 3).
We also had another hypothesis about children’s adoption. The hypothesis
was that people would agree that gay adoption would not affect children’s
upbringing. Another result we got from our surveys was that most of the
students believed that gay adoption would not affect children’s upbringing.
This supports our hypothesis. The result indicated that 97 students believed that
there would no difference between the children in the gay couples’ family and
in the heterosexual couples’ family; it meant that 67% of students in the
survey thought that there would not be any effects between these two different
families. 26 students thought there would be some slight difference between
these two kinds of couples’ families, it almost got 18%. Only 13 students
indicated that the same sex family would affect children’s upbringing; it was
9% in the survey (Chart 4).
Lastly, our
hypothesis was the TTU students would think that the gay couples are as stable
as the heterosexual couples. In
the survey, we asked the students what they thought about whether the gay
couples were more stable or less stable than heterosexual couples.
According to our survey, more than a half of the students believed that both
the gay couple and heterosexual couples have the same stability in general. 93
students indicated that these two kinds of couple would be equally stable in
social life; it means 64% of students thought the relationship between these
two kinds of couples would be the same. This supports our hypothesis. But 17
students, about 12% in the survey, said the gay couple would be less stable
than the heterosexual couple. Only 7 students thought that the gay couple would
be more stable than the heterosexual couple; this means 5% of students would
prefer the heterosexual family to the same sex family (Chart
5).
Discussion
We created some hypotheses before we started our survey. In total 145
surveys were filled out, so we could follow these statements and come up with
the results. The survey showed that this sample was from students in TTU; 88% of
students in total were Americans; 12% of the total students were
internationals. In the American students’ group, almost 71% students came from
Texas, and the others, about 29%, came from other parts of the U.S. That result
came like that because most TTU students were from the United States, which
meant they had American nationality. Also, the survey showed that 51% were
female students and 49% were male students in the survey. This also showed that
the number of males was very close to the number of females.
According
to the survey, 73 students, 50% in the
survey, reported they had a strongly agreeing attitude about this decision. 50
students, 35% in the survey, stood for neutrality or at least they would not
choose against this policy. This meant that means it is easier for students to
accept the new policy or new things. Normally, younger people study in school
and they obtain the advanced knowledge and ideas from school or society, so it
is easier for the younger people to accept the policy about supporting the
Supreme Court’s decision legalizing gay marriage. At the same time, I think
there is a relationship with younger psychology, because it is common that
younger people are more social. The behavioral psychology of younger people
makes it easier for them to obtain new ideas. This is just trying to explain
the younger people’s support for the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing gay
marriage. We cannot make a good comparison between younger people and old
people, since we didn’t take enough old people in the survey. So we can only conclude
that younger people tend to agree with the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing
gay marriage.
We focused on
whether Texas Tech students would not support Kim Davis's refusal. We noted
that Texas Tech students would not support Kim Davis's refusal. The survey
reported that 86 students reported that they thought Kim Davis should do her
job; this means most of students had thought Kim Davis should do her job; this
means these students didn’t support Kim Davis’ refusal to issue licenses to the
gay couples. The reason for this percentage was the idea from students who had
thought that everyone should have their own right in the U.S. Both the gay
couples and heterosexual couples should have the same right by law. From this
point we can learn how important the rights are in the U.S.! However, we know
that American students have more open ideas than other countries’, so we still
need do some surveys to international students. On the other hand, we also
noted from the survey that 15% of students supported Kim Davis’ refusal to
issue licenses to gay couples. We can learn that there are some students who preferred
heterosexual couples.
On the other hand, we tried to find out
whether TTU students would support the children’s adoption by gay couples. For
this information, the survey indicated that more than a half of the students agreed
that gay couples should be able to adopt children. Only 10 students were
strongly disagreeing with this action. In the United States, everyone should
have the equal rights and obligations in society. So the students thought that
gay couples should be able to enjoy having children. At the same time, they
have an obligation to look after children and bring them up.
One of the hypotheses stated that people would agree that gay adoption
would not affect children’s upbringing. What we found after the survey was that
most of the students believed that gay adoption would not affect children’s upbringing. The result indicated that 97 students indicated
that there would be no difference between the children in the gay couples’
family and in the heterosexual couples’ family; it meant that these students in
the survey thought that there would not be any effects between these two
different families. Our
study showed that we were right at the beginning. The reason people agreed that
gay adoption would not affect children’s upbringing was that education for
children’s upbringing includes several factors, such as school education,
society education and so on. Family education is only a small part of children’s
lives.
Also,
we believed that TTU students would think that the gay couples are as stable as
heterosexual couples. According to our survey, 64% of students indicated that these two kinds of couples would be equally
stable in social life; it means these students thought the relationship between
these two kinds of couples would be the same. The relationship should be built
based on the common efforts of each one in the couples, friends and other
social relationships, so the gay couples are as stable as heterosexual couples
if each one in the couple tried their best to build their relationships.
Finally, we could say that we have gotten any
information we needed by collecting the surveys. All of the data were useful to
reach the results. However, we still have some limitations in our survey, such
as the attitude of the international student or the elder people. Sometimes,
international students and elder people are maintaining less open opinions than
American young students, so we may get different results if we take the
international students and elder people into account. I think we still need to
do some more surveys to show more results or information about gay marriage.
Conclusion
Gay marriage has
become very important in our social life. To discover this information, we take
145 students of Texas Tech University into our survey; 88% of students in total
were Americans; 12% of the total students were internationals. The study showed
that Texas Tech students supported the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing gay
marriage, and they didn’t support Kim Davis's refusal. It also indicated that
The TTU students supported children’s adoption by gay couples and they agreed
that gay adoption would not affect children’s upbringing. Meanwhile, we can
know from the survey that the TTU students thought that the gay couples were as
stable as the heterosexual couples. However, we still have some limitations in
our survey; for example, this gay marriage study of TTU students was a small
sample, which included only 145 TTU students. The sample of TTU students should
include at least 3000 TTU students to get ideal results. On the other hand, we
only concentrated on the opinion of American young students; we also need to
pay attention to the international students or the older people. I think we
still need to do some more surveys to show more results or information about
gay marriage.
Reference
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family over
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Appendix A
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