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
Reference:
Almond,
M. (2015, August 16). Adoption rights: The next frontier for gay Alabama
couples two months after marriage ruling.
Al.com. Retrieved on September 10, 2015 from:
Beitsch,
R. (2015, August 19). Despite same-sex marriage ruling, gay adoption rights
uncertain in some states. USA Today.
Retrieved on September 1, 2015 from: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/19/despite-same-sex-marriage-ruling-gay-adoption-rights-uncertain-some-states/31992309/
Green, E. (2015,
August 13). Christian bakers gotta bake, even for gays. The Atlantic. Retrieved on September 25, 2015 from:
Gutierrez,
G. (2015. Sep, 9). Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis isn't Kentucky's only gay
marriage holdout. RenewAmerica. Retrieved
on September 10, 2015
from:
Growing
support for gay marriage: Changed minds and changing demographics. (2013, March
20). Pew Research Center. Retrieved on September 25, 2015 from:
Generations
at Odds: The Millennial Generation and the Future of Gay and Lesbian Rights
(2011, August). Public Religion Research Institute. Retrieved on September 25,
2015 from:
http://publicreligion.org/research/2011/08/generations-at-odds/#.VfkWhBFVhBc
http://publicreligion.org/research/2011/08/generations-at-odds/#.VfkWhBFVhBc
Holpuch, A.
(2015, September 1). Defiant Kentucky clerk summoned to federal court over gay
marriage refusal. The Guardian.
Retrieved on September 25, 2015 from:
Lewin,
T. (2015, August 12). Mississippi ban on adoption by same-sex couples is
challenged. The New York Times.
Retrieved on September 25, 2015 from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/13/us/mississippi-ban-on-adoption-same-sex-couples-challenged.html?ref=topics&_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/13/us/mississippi-ban-on-adoption-same-sex-couples-challenged.html?ref=topics&_r=0
New poll proves
national majority support same-sex marriage. (2013, Marth 20). The Washington Post. Retrieved in September
25, 2015 from:
Pettus,
E. (2015, August 28). Judge is asked to block ban on adoption by gay couples. Daily Journal. Retrieved September 1,
2015, from
Polls
shows slight dip in gay marriage support since Supreme Court ruling. (2015,
July 18th). USA Today. Retrieved on
September 1, 2015 from:
Swift,
A. (2014, May 30th). Most Americans Say Same-Sex Couples Entitled to Adopt.
Gallup.com. Retrieved on September 11, 2015 from:
Gallup.com. Retrieved on September 11, 2015 from:
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